At five o’clock the next day the family crowded into the touring car for an excursion, and left Gabriella in a deserted house to receive the lover of her girlhood.  Before going Mrs. Carr had embraced her sentimentally; Charley had dropped one of his broad jokes on the subject of the reunion; Jane had murmured sweetly that there was no man on earth she admired as much as she did Arthur; and the girls had effusively complimented Gabriella on her appearance.  Even Willy, the baby of eighteen years ago, had prophesied with hilarity that “Old Arthur Peyton wasn’t coming for nothing.”  One and all they appeared to take her part in the romance for granted; and while she waited in the drawing-room, gazing through the interstices of Jane’s new lace curtains into the avenue, where beyond the flying motor cars the grassy strip in the middle of the street was dappled with shadows, she wondered if she also were taking Arthur’s devotion for granted.  She had not seen him for eighteen years, and yet she was awaiting him as expectantly as if he were still her lover.  Would his presence really quiet this strange new restlessness in her heart—­this restlessness which had come to her so suddenly after her meeting with Florrie?  Was it true that her youth was slipping from her before she had grasped all the happiness that life offered?  Or was it only the stirring of the spring winds, of the young green against the blue sky, of the mating birds, of the roving, provocative scents of flowers, of the checkered light and shade on the grassy strip under the maples?  Was it all these things, or was it none of them, that awoke this longing, so vague and yet so unquenchable, in her heart?

A car stopped in the street outside, the bell rang, and she watched the figure of a trim mulatto maid flit through the hall to the door.  An instant later Arthur’s name was announced, and Gabriella, with her hands in his clasp, stood looking into his face.  It had been eighteen years since they parted, and in those eighteen years she had carried his image like some sacred talisman in her breast.

“How little you’ve changed, Gabriella,” he said after a moment of silence in which she told herself that he was far better looking, far more distinguished than she had remembered him.  “You are larger than you used to be, but your face is as girlish as ever.”

“And I have two children nearly grown,” she replied with a trembling little laugh; “a daughter who is already thinking of the White Sulphur.”

They sat down in the pink chairs on the gray carpet, and leaned forward, looking into each other’s faces as tenderly as they had done when they were lovers.