“I never loved George.  It was madness, nothing else,” returned Gabriella, and she really believed it.

“Well, your thinkin’ it madness now don’t mean it wan’t love ten years ago,” commented Miss Polly, with the shrewdness of a detached and observant spinster.

“I suppose you’re right,” admitted Gabriella thoughtfully.  Though she had not mentioned Arthur, her mind was full of him, and she was perfectly convinced that she had loved him all her life—­even during her brief period of “madness.”  It was a higher love, she felt, so much higher, indeed, that it had been too spiritual, too ethereal, to take root in the earthly soil from which her passion for George had sprung.  But, if it were not love, why was it that every faint stirring of her emotions revived the memory so poignantly?  Why was it that Miss Polly’s sentimental interpretation of the doctor’s interest evoked the image of Arthur?

“No, I never think of George—­never,” she repeated, and her fine, pure features assumed an expression of sternness.  “But I shan’t marry again,” she went on after a pause in which Miss Polly’s sewing-machine buzzed cheerfully over its work.  “I’ve had enough of marriage to last me for one lifetime.”

The machine stopped, and Miss Polly, snipping the thread as she came to the end of a seam, turned squarely to answer.  “Don’t you be too sure about that, honey.  You may have had enough to last you for ten years or so, but wait till you’ve turned forty, and if the hankerin’ for love don’t catch you at forty, you may begin to expect it somewhere around fifty.  Why, just look at that poor piano-playin’ old maid in there.  Wouldn’t you think she’d have done with it?  Well, she ain’t—­she ain’t, and you ain’t either, for that matter, I don’t care how hard you argue!”

“There are ten happy years ahead of me anyhow!” rejoined Gabriella, with a ringing laugh—­the laugh, as Dr. French had once remarked, of a woman who is sound to the core.  She had triumphed over the past, and was not afraid, she told herself valiantly, of the future.

At the beginning of July the children went with Miss Polly to the country, and Gabriella, after seeing them off, turned back alone to begin a long summer of economy and drudgery.  In order to keep Fanny and Archibald out of town she was obliged to deny herself every unnecessary comfort—­luxuries she had given up long ago—­and to stay at Dinard’s, in Madame’s place, through the worst weeks of the year, when the showroom was deserted except for an occasional stray Southerner, and even the six arrogant young women were away on vacations.  Even if she had had the chance, the money for a trip would have been lacking, and to fill Madame’s conspicuous place gave her, she realized, a certain importance and authority in the house.  There was opportunity, in a small way, to work out some of her ideas of system and order, and there was sufficient time to think out a definite and practical plan for