She was not thinking of Gabriella.  True to the deepest instincts of her nature, she thought first of her son, then of her husband.  It was not that she did not care for her daughter-in-law, did not sympathize; but the fact remained that Gabriella was only George’s wife to her, while George was flesh of her flesh, bone of her bone, soul of her soul.  Though her choice was not deliberate, though it was unconscious and instinctive—­nevertheless, she had chosen.  At the crucial moment instinct had risen superior to reason, and she had chosen, not with her judgment, but with every quivering nerve and fibre of her being.  Gabriella was right, but George was her son; and had it been possible to secure George’s happiness by sacrificing the right to the wrong, she would have made that sacrifice without hesitation, without scruple, and without regret.

“There’s his father now,” she whispered, lifting her disfigured face.  “Oh, Gabriella, I believe it will kill me!”

While Gabriella stood there waiting for George’s father to enter, and listening to his slow, deliberate tread on the stairs, the heavy, laborious tread of a man who is uncertain of his strength, she remembered vividly, as if she were living it over again, the night she had waited by her fire to tell George that his first child was to be born.  Many thoughts passed through her mind, and at last these thoughts resolved themselves into a multitude of crowding images—­all distinct and vivid images of George’s face.  She saw his face as she had first seen and loved it, with its rich colouring, its blue-gray eyes, like wells of romance she had once thought, its look of poetry and emotion which had covered so much that was merely commonplace and gross.  She saw him as he had looked at their marriage, as he had looked, bending over her after her first child was born, and then she saw him as he had parted from her that morning—­flushed, sneering, a little coarsened, but still boyish, still charming.  Well, it was all over now.  It had been over so long that she had even ceased to regret it—­for she was not by nature one of the women who could wear mourning for a lifetime.

The door opened:  Archibald Fowler came in very slowly; and the first sight of his face brought home to her with a shock the discovery that he was the one of them who had suffered most.  He looked an old man; his gentle scholar’s face had taken an ashen hue; and his eyes were the eyes of one who has only partially recovered from the blow that has prostrated him.

“My dear child,” he said; “my dear daughter,” and laid his hand on her shoulder.

She clung to him, feeling a passionate pity, not for herself, but for him.  “You have too much to bear,” she murmured caressingly.  “You mustn’t take it like this.  You must try to get over it.  For all our sakes you must try to get over it.”  The irony of it all—­that she should be consoling her husband’s father for her husband’s desertion of her—­did not appear to her until long afterwards.  At the time she thought only that she—­that somebody—­must make the tragedy easier for him to bear.