“So long ago,” he retorted with jovial humour, “that you wouldn’t have known me.”

An impulse of curiosity urged her to an utterly irrelevant response.  “I wonder if you have known many women?” She felt that she should like to hear his story from him, there in the deserted yard; but when he answered her, he revealed a personal reticence worthy of the aristocratic traditions of Mrs. Carr.  “Oh, I haven’t had time for them,” he replied indifferently.

“Perhaps there aren’t so many in Bonanza City?”

“Oh, there’re plenty,” he rejoined gaily, “if you take the trouble to look for them.”

“And you didn’t?” They had entered the house, and she spoke merrily as she crossed to the staircase.

“Well, the sort I found didn’t take my fancy, you see!” he tossed back playfully from his door.

Her foot was on the lowest step, when, hesitating with a birdlike movement, she looked at him over her right shoulder.

“Well, that’s a pity.  A woman could have told you a good many things,” she observed.

“For instance?” He was still jesting.

Poised for flight, she gazed back at him, challenging his eyes.

“Oh, not to collect gold-headed walking-sticks, not to believe in golden-oak, and not to be so extravagantly—­slangy.”

As she ran up the staircase, a burst of laughter followed her in the midst of which she distinguished the retort:  “Well, I own to the slang, but I inherited the oak, and the sticks were all given me—­by women.”

The temptation to fling back, “of a sort?” came to her; but she conquered it as she passed demurely into the sitting-room, where Miss Polly was reading the afternoon paper before an open fire.  “I mustn’t get too friendly,” she told herself, reprovingly.  “It is better to keep up a certain formality.”  And she determined that at the next meeting she would be dignified and aloof.

But the next meeting did not occur until January, for O’Hara went West the following day, and for more than two months Miss Polly and Gabriella were alone in the house.  Though she was working doubly hard at Dinard’s, the loneliness of the winter evenings after the Christmas holidays were over became almost intolerable to Gabriella; and the bleak month of January stretched ahead of her in an interminable prospect of cold and gloom.  For the past ten years the children had absorbed her life, after her working hours, so entirely that the parting from them had been an unbearable wrench, and had left her with an aching feeling as if an arm had been cut away.  She had had little time to make friends; the streets of the city isolated her as completely as if they had been spaces of uninhabited wilderness; and, except for her casual remarks to Miss Polly, she had lived from day to day without speaking a word that was not directly concerned with the management or the sales of Dinard’s.  Since her divorce, obeying perhaps some inherited tradition, she had