Jimmy, who had listened to this advice with the expression of tolerant amusement he always wore when women began to talk about the more serious affairs of life in his presence, made an honest, if vulgar, attempt to lighten the solemnity of the situation with a joke.

“Gabriella isn’t trying to earn church money.  You’re out gunning for a living, aren’t you, Ella?” he inquired.

“I’m sick of being dependent,” repeated Gabriella, while her face grew stern.  “Do you think if Jane had had enough money to live on that she would ever have stood Charley so long?”

“Oh, yes, I should, Gabriella.  Marriage is sacred to me!” exclaimed Jane, whose perfect wifeliness atoned, even in the opinion of Jimmy, for any discrepancies in logic.  “Nothing on earth could have induced me to leave him until—­until this happened.”

The conviction that she had never at any moment since her marriage “failed in her duty to Charley” lent a touching sanctity to her expression, while the bitter lines around her mouth faded in the wan glow that flooded her face.  Whatever her affliction, however intense her humiliation, Jane was supported always by the most comforting of beliefs—­the belief that she had been absolutely right and Charley absolutely wrong through the ten disillusioning years of their married life.  Never for an instant—­never even in a nightmare—­had she been visited by the disquieting suspicion that she was not entirely blameless.

“Well, you’ve left him now anyway,” said Gabriella, with the disarming candour which delighted Jimmy and perplexed Uncle Meriweather, “so somebody has got to help you take care of the children.”

“She shall never come to want as long as Pussy and I have a cent left,” declared Cousin Jimmy, and his voice expressed what Mrs. Carr described afterward as “proper feeling.”

“And we’d really rather that you’d earn less and keep in your own station of life,” said Pussy decisively.

“If you mean that you’d rather I’d work buttonholes or crochet mats than go into a store and earn a salary, then I can’t do it,” answered Gabriella, as resolute, though not so right-minded, as poor Jane.  “I’d rather die than be dependent all my life, and I’m going to earn my living if I have to break rocks to do it.”

CHAPTER II

POOR JANE

Supper was over, and Gabriella, still in the dress she had worn all day, was picking up the children’s clothes from the floor of her room.  According to Mrs. Carr’s hereditary habit in sorrow or sickness, Jane had been served in bed with tea and toast, while several small hard cots had been brought down from the attic and arranged in the available space in the two bedrooms.  As Gabriella looked at the sleeping children, who had kicked the covering away, and lay with round rosy limbs gleaming in the lamplight, she remembered that Arthur Peyton was coming at nine