“What under the sun did you do to her?” inquired Miss Murphy, holding her wheaten-red pompadour down in the wind.  “I declare I thought at first it was murder!”

“I told her the truth, when she asked me, that was all.”

“Well, I never!  Now what, in the name of goodness, possessed you?”

“I had to.  I don’t see how I could have kept from it.”

“Good gracious!  There’re always ways, but what sort of truth was it?  You see, it’s been so long since I’ve met one,” she explained airily, “that I don’t even know what they’re like.”

“It was about Mrs. Pletheridge’s gown—­the one she wanted her to buy, you know.  I told her it didn’t suit her.  And it didn’t—­you know it didn’t,” she concluded emphatically.

“Of course it didn’t, but I don’t see why you had to go and tell her.”

“She asked me.  They both asked me, and if I’d lied she wouldn’t have believed me.  You can’t fool people so outrageously, and I wouldn’t if I could.  It isn’t honest, and it isn’t good business.”

“Anything is good business that gets by,” remarked Miss Murphy, who had a philosophy.  “I must go indoors or this wind will blow all my puffs away.”

She departed breezily; and Gabriella, returning to the workroom, spent her afternoon patiently stitching flat garlands of flowers on the brim of a hat.  When she left the house at six o’clock the April weather was so lovely that she decided to walk all the way home; and while she moved rapidly with the crowd in Fifth Avenue, she considered anxiously the possible disastrous results of Madame’s anger.  Between her and absolute want there stood only her salary, and she had deliberately—­she realized now how deliberate her reply had been—­undermined that thin and insecure protection.  Though she was now earning as much as thirty dollars a week, an illness of a year ago, when she had been obliged to stop work for several months, had exhausted the remains of the modest nest egg with which she had started; and to lose her place, she knew, would mean either starvation or beggary.  There was no one, with the exception of Cousin Jimmy, of whom she could beg, and to beg of him would be a tacit confession that she had failed as a breadwinner.  In Mrs. Carr’s last letter Charley had appeared in a new light as a reformed character, a devoted attendant at church, and an enthusiastic convert to the prohibition party; and Gabriella had gathered from her mother’s pious rambling that, like other sinners who have outlived temptation, he was devoting his middle years to a violent crusade against the moderate indulgences of the abstemious.  But Charley, she felt, was out of the question.  She would die before she would stoop to ask help of a man she had despised as heartily as she had once despised Charley.  She must sink or swim by her own strength, not by another’s.