“It was the most homelike place we saw, by a long way.  There ain’t many places in New York where you can have a flower-bed in the front yard.”

“Do you think Fanny will be happy there?  A year before this stage mania seized her, you know, she was wild to move to Park Avenue.”

“Well, you know I’ve got a suspicion,” Miss Folly dropped her voice to a whisper.  “Of course it ain’t nothin’ but a suspicion, for she never opens her mouth about it to me, but I’ve got a right smart suspicion that that young actor she is so crazy about lives somewhere down there in that neighbourhood, and she thinks she could watch him go by in the street.  I don’t believe, you know, that she’s ever so much as spoken to him in her life.”

“It’s impossible!” exclaimed Gabriella, for this revelation of Miss Polly’s discernment was astonishing to her; “but if that’s the case,” she added gravely, “I oughtn’t to think of moving into the house.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know that he’s anywhere very near, and Fanny’s goin’ to be at boarding-school for a year or two and away with Jane at the White Sulphur in the summers.  She won’t be there much anyhow, will she?”

“Not much, but how I shall miss her—­and, of course, if I miss her, I’ll miss Archibald even more, because he gives me no anxiety.  It’s odd,” she finished abruptly, “but I’ve been depressed all day.  I suppose my birthday has something to do with it.”

“You ain’t often like that, Gabriella.  I never saw anybody keep in better spirits than you do.”

“I’m happy, but the spring makes me restless.  I feel as if I’d missed something I ought to have had.”

“All of us feel that way at times, I reckon, but it don’t last, and we settle down comfortably after a while to doin’ without what we haven’t got.  And you’ve been mighty successful, honey.  You’ve succeeded in everything you undertook except marriage.”

“Yes, except my marriage.”

“Well, I reckon things happen and you can’t do ’em over again,” observed the little seamstress, with the natural fatalism of the “poor white” of the South.

As she undressed and got into bed, Gabriella told herself cheerfully that there was, indeed, no need to worry over things that you couldn’t change after they happened.  From the open window a shaft of light fell on her mirror, and while she watched it, she tried to convince her rebellious imagination that she was perfectly satisfied, that life had given her all that she had ever desired.  “I have more than most women anyhow,” she insisted, weakening a little.  “I’ve accomplished what I undertook, and by the time I’m fifty, if things go well, I may become a rich woman.  I’ll be able to give Fanny everything that she wants, and if she hasn’t married, we can go abroad every summer, and Archibald can join us in Switzerland or the Tyrol.  About Archibald, at least, I can feel perfectly easy.  He is the kind of boy to succeed.  He is strong, he hasn’t