“I know, honey,” agreed Miss Polly, suddenly softened, “and I’d give anything on earth if you and Arthur could come together again.”

“It wouldn’t be any use.  I made my choice, and I have had to abide by it.  He could never forgive me—­“.  She stopped as if she were choking, and Miss Polly said sympathetically: 

“Well, I wish he had a chance to, that’s all.  Why don’t you run down to Richmond for a few days this spring to see your folks?  Your ma and all would be so glad to see you, and it ain’t as if you had the children to keep you back.  The thing that worries me,” she added with feeling, “is the thought of your spendin’ the summer here without the children.  If Archibald goes to camp from school and Fanny joins Jane at the White Sulphur Springs as soon as her school is out, you won’t have them at all, will you?”

“No, but they will be happy; that is the only thing that matters.”

“It seems all wrong to me.  What do you get out of life, honey?”

“What do any of us get out of it, dear little Miss Polly, except the joy of triumphing?  It’s overcoming that really matters, nothing else, and it is the same thing to you and to me that it is to the man downstairs.  I am happy because in my little way I stood the test of struggle, and so are you, and so is Mr. O’Hara.”

“But you’re young yet, and it ain’t natural for you to live as you’re doin’.  Lots of women marry when they’re older than you are.”

“Oh, yes, if they want to—­”

For a minute the little seamstress rattled her newspaper while she looked at her without replying.  Then, after folding the paper, and removing her spectacles, she asked grimly:  “Can you look me in the eyes, Gabriella, and tell me that you ain’t still hankerin’ after Arthur?”

The blush of a girl made the business-like Gabriella appear as young and as piquantly feminine as her daughter.

“No, Miss Polly, I cannot,” she answered with incomparable directness; “I have loved Arthur all my life.”

“That’s just what I thought all along, and yet you went off and married somebody else.”  Excited by the unexpected confession, Miss Polly was quivering with sympathy.

In that supreme instant of self-revelation Gabriella answered this accusation as if it had been uttered by her remorseful conscience.  “But that wasn’t love,” she said slowly; “it was my youth craving experience; it was my youth reaching after the unknown, the untried, the undiscovered.  We all go questing for adventure one way or another, I suppose, but it was not the reality.”

“I wonder what is,” said Miss Polly in a whisper; “I wonder what is, Gabriella?”

“That,” replied Gabriella softly, “is what I am still trying to discover.”

CHAPTER IX

THE PAST