“Everything has changed, Arthur,” she said, “and I don’t think I ought to go on being engaged.”  Then because her words sounded insincere, she added sternly:  “Even if we could be married—­and of course we can’t be—­I—­I don’t feel that I should want to marry.  I am not sure that I love you enough to marry you.”

It was all so unromantic, so unemotional, so utterly different from the scene she had pictured when she imagined what “breaking her engagement” would be like.  Then she had always thought of herself as dissolving in tears on the horsehair sofa, which had become sacred to the tragedy of poor Jane; but, to her surprise, she did not feel now the faintest inclination to cry.  It ought to have been theatrical, but it wasn’t—­not even when she took off her engagement ring, as she had read in novels that girls did at the decisive instant, and laid it down on the table.  When she remembered this afterwards, it appeared rather foolish, but Arthur seemed not to notice it, and when Marthy came in to light the fire in the morning, she found the ring lying on a copy of Gray’s Elegy and brought it back to Gabriella.

“I’ll never give you up,” said Arthur stubbornly, and knowing his character, she felt that he had spoken the truth.  He could not give her up even had he wished it, for, like a belief, she had passed from his brain into the fibre of his being.  She had become a habit to him, and not love, but the inability to change, to cease thinking what he had always thought, to break a fixed manner of life, would keep him faithful to her in his heart.

“I’m sorry—­oh, I’m sorry,” she murmured, longing to have it over and to return to Jane and the children.  It occurred to her almost resentfully that love was not always an unmixed delight.

“Is there any one else, Gabriella?” he asked with a sudden choking sound in his voice.  “I have sometimes thought—­in the last four or five months—­that there might be—­that you had changed—­that—­” He stopped abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.

“There is some one else and there isn’t,” she replied simply.  “I mean I think of some one else very often—­of some one who isn’t in my life at all—­from whom I never hear—­”

“Is it George Fowler?”

She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew radiant.

“And you have known him less than a year?”

Again she bowed her head without speaking.  What was there, after all, that she could say in justification of her behaviour?

A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest.  “And I thought women were more constant than men!” he exclaimed with something of the baffled and helpless feeling which had overtaken Uncle Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.

The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.