the future.  Her aim from the first had been, not only to catch on, but to master the details of the business, and she knew that, in spite of Madame’s sporadic attempts to keep her in her place, she was gradually making herself felt—­she was slowly impressing her individual methods upon the establishment.  Madame was no longer what she once was, and the business was showing it.  She was getting old, she was growing tired, and her naturally careless methods of work were fastening upon her.  In the last years she had offered less and less resistance to her tendency to let go, to leave loose ends ungathered, to allow opportunities to slip out of her grasp, to be inexact and unsystematic.  There was urgent need of a strong hand at Dinard’s, if the business was to be kept from running gradually downhill, and Gabriella became convinced, as the days passed, that hers was the only hand in the house strong enough to check the perilous descent to failure.  Her plans were made, her scheme arranged, but, as Madame was both jealous and suspicious, she saw that she must move very cautiously.

There were times—­since this is history, not romance—­when her spirits flagged and her strength failed her.  The heat of the summer was intense, and the breathless days dragged on interminably into the breathless nights.  When her work was over she would wait until the last of her fellow-workers had gone home, and then walk across to Sixth Avenue and take the Harlem elevated train for her deserted rooms, which appeared more desolate, more ugly than ever because the children were absent.  In the lonely kitchen—­for Miss Danton and the art students were all away—­she would eat her supper of bread and tea, which she drank without cream because it was more economical; and then, lighting her lamp, she would sew or read until midnight.  Sometimes, when it was too hot for the lamp, and she found it impossible to work by the flickering gas, she would sit by her window and look down on the panting humanity in the street below—­on the small shopkeepers seated in chairs on the sidewalk, on the little son of the Italian fruiterer playing with his dog, on the three babies of the Jewish tobacco merchant, sprawling in the door of the tiny shop which was pressed like a sardine between a bakery and a dairy.  She was alone in the apartment, and there were late afternoons when the grim emptiness of the rooms seemed haunted, when she shrank back in apprehensive foreboding as she turned her key in the lock, when the profound silence within preyed on her nerves like an obsession.  On these days she dreaded to go down the long hail to the kitchen, where the fluttering clothes-lines on fire-escapes at the back of the next apartment house offered the only suggestion of human companionship in the unfriendly wilderness of the city.  The sight of the children’s toys, of Fanny’s story books, of Archibald’s roller skates, moved her to tears once or twice; and when this happened she caught herself up sharply and struggled with the vague, malignant demon of melancholy.