It was the morning of Gabriella’s thirty-eighth birthday, and she was standing, with her hat on, before the window of her sitting-room, gazing with dreaming eyes at the young leaves on the elm tree.  The day’s work was ahead of her, but for a little while, standing there by the open window, she gave herself, with a sense of pleasure, of abandonment, to the rare luxury of regret.  Out of her whole year it was the one day when, for a few hours, she permitted herself to think sadly of the past and the future, when she cherished in her heart something of the gentle melancholy of her mother’s retrospective philosophy.

In the street, beyond the narrow yard, where the grass lay like a veil, there was a curious deadening of sounds, as if the traffic had become suddenly muffled in the languorous softness of spring.  Out of this imaginary stillness floated the sharp twittering of sparrows and the bright laugh of a child at play in one of the neighbouring yards.  Above the grim outlines of the city the sky shone divinely clear and blue, flecked by a single cloud, soft as an eagle’s feather, which drifted in a mist of light above the horizon.  The city, beneath that azure sky, borrowed the transparent brightness of an object that is imprisoned in crystal.  White magic had transformed it for an hour, and the street, the houses, the shining elm tree, and the distant frowning brows of the skyscrapers, all seemed as unreal as the vivid yet impalpable images in a dream.  And into this world of crystal there drifted, like the essence of spring, the dreamy fragrance from the window box filled with white hyacinths.

While she stood there Gabriella thought pensively of many things.  She thought of the day’s work before her, of the gown she was designing for Mrs. Pletheridge, of Fanny’s latest lover, the brother of a schoolmate, of the clothes she should send the child to the White Sulphur Springs, of her mother, and of Jane’s eldest daughter, Margaret; and then very slowly, with the scent of the hyacinths drowning all merely prosaic memories, she began to think hopelessly and tenderly of Arthur Peyton.  She thought of him as he had looked on the day when she had told him of her engagement of the sympathetic expression in his eyes, and of his beautiful manner, which she had felt at the time she could never forget.  Well, after eighteen years she had not forgotten it.  Compared with Arthur, all other men seemed to her as unreal as shadows.  “How could Miss Polly imagine that I’d think of Ben O’Hara after a love like that?” she reflected indignantly.

And then, perhaps because for a shadow he was so solidly substantial, she became aware that O’Hara’s image was trespassing upon the hallowed soil of her reverie.  To be sure, she had seen a great deal of him since George’s death, when he had been so wonderfully considerate and helpful.  Scarcely a day had passed since then that he had not brightened by some reminder of his friendship.  They had