The door-bell rang sharply, and Gabriella went to let in the doctor, a brisk, authoritative young man of the new school, who had learned everything there was to be known about medicine except the way to behave in a sickroom, and who abhorred a bedside manner as heartily as if it were calomel or castor oil.  His name was Darrow, and he was the assistant of old Dr. Walker, Mrs. Carr’s family physician, who never went out at night since he had passed his seventieth birthday.  Gabriella, who liked him because he was not anecdotal and gave small doses of medicine, hastily led the way to her mother’s room before she ran back to meet Charley Gracey at the door of the dark parlour.

“You can’t see her now.  The doctor is with her,” she whispered.  “I’ll make a light in here and you can wait.”

“Let me,” said Charley, quite as pleasantly as if he were not a bad husband, while he found a match and struck it on the sole of his foot.  Then, as the gas flared up, he exclaimed, with a low whistle, “By Jove, you’re a sight, Gabriella!”

“Well, it’s your fault,” replied Gabriella sharply, letting him see, as she told herself, exactly what she thought of him.  “You’ve made Jane so ill we thought she was dying.”

“I’m sorry for that,” he said, suddenly smitten with gravity.  “Is she really so bad?”

His charming freckled face, with its irrepressible humour, grew almost grotesquely solemn, while the habitual merriment faded slowly from his light-gray eyes, leaving them empty of expression.  He was a short, rather thick-set man, not particularly good-looking, not particularly clever, but possessing a singular, if unaccountable, charm.  Everybody liked Charley, though nobody respected him.  He was a scamp, but a lovable scamp, while Jane, with the best intentions in the world, had managed to make every virtue unattractive.  When people condemned him, they said that he was “utterly unprincipled”; when they softened in their judgment, they admitted that he had “the best heart in the world.”

“I suppose it isn’t any worse than other attacks,” answered Gabriella, “but you know what they are like.”

“Yes, I know,” replied Charley.  “Oh, Lord, don’t I?”

“She asked mother to send for you,” continued Gabriella.  “She wants you to know that she has forgiven you.”

“Has she?” said Charley, without elation.  Turning away, he stared for a minute or two at the engraving of the children feeding fish in a pond; then, with his eyes still glued to the picture, he burst out passionately:  “Gabriella, I’d hoped she wouldn’t this time!”

“If I were she,” retorted Gabriella crushingly, “I would never speak to you again until the day of my death.”

“If she were you,” rejoined Charley, with barefaced audacity, “I’d have been a good husband.  Why, I was simply starving to be a good husband when I married Jane.  It’s my ideal in life.  I’m all for the domestic thing by nature.  I was tired—­positively dog-tired of the other kind.  I wanted a wife.  I adored—­I’ve always adored babies—­”