“I thought so, too,” she observed dispassionately.  “I thought so, too, and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when it happened.  You yourself aren’t more shocked and surprised than I was in the beginning,” she added.

“But you’ve got used to the thought, I suppose?”

“Well, one has to, you see.  What else is there to do?  I always understood from mother”—­she went on with the same eager interest, as if she were stumbling upon new and important intellectual discoveries—­“I always understood that women never fell in love with men first—­I mean until they had had positive proof that their love would be returned.  But in this case that didn’t seem to matter at all.  Nothing mattered, and the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the more I found myself being false.  It’s all very strange,” she concluded, “but that is just how it happened.”

“And he knows nothing about it?”

“Oh, no.  I told him I was engaged to you, and then he went away.”

For an instant he was silent, and watching his face, so carefully guarded and controlled by habit that it had the curious blank look of a statue’s, Gabriella could form no idea of the suppressed inarticulate suffering in his heart.

“And if he came back would you marry him?” he asked.

Before replying she sat for a minute gazing down on her folded hands and weighing each separate word of her answer.

“I should try not to, Arthur,” she said at last, “but—­but I am not sure that I should be able to help it.”

When at last he had said “good-bye” rather grimly, and gone out of the door without looking back, she was conscious of an immense relief, of a feeling that she could breathe freely again after an age of oppression.  There was a curious sense of unreality about the hour she had just passed through, as if it belonged not to actual life, but to a play she had been rehearsing.  She had felt nothing.  The breaking of her engagement had failed utterly to move her.

After bolting the front door, she turned out the gas in the parlour, pushed back the lump of coal in the grate in the hope of saving it for the morrow, and went cautiously down the hall to her room.  As she passed her mother’s door, a glimmer of light along the threshold made her pause for a minute, and while she hesitated, an anxious voice floated out to her: 

“Gabriella, is that you?”

“Yes, Mother, do you want anything?”

“Jane has one of her heart attacks.  I put her to bed in my room because it is more comfortable than the dining-room.  Don’t you think you had better go back and wake Marthy?”

“Is she ill?  Let me come in,” answered Gabriella, pushing open the door and brushing by Mrs. Carr, who stood, shrunken and shivering, in a gray flannel wrapper and felt slippers.