“Is it too late, then, Gabriella?” asked Arthur, after a long silence, and in his voice there was the sound of suffering acquiescence.

“I’m afraid it is, dear Arthur,” she answered softly, and they did not speak again until the lights blazed over them, and they ran into Monument Avenue.  After all, it was too late.  What could she have added to the answer she had given him?

When they reached the house, he did not come in with her, and tears stained her face while she went slowly up the steps, and stood beside Jane’s hydrangeas with her hand on the bell.  Then, as the door opened quickly, she saw her mother waiting, with an eager, expectant look, at the door of the library, and heard her excited voice murmur:  “Well, dear?”

“We had a lovely drive, mother.  Arthur is just as I remembered him, except that he has grown so much older.”

A disappointed expression crossed Mrs. Carr’s face.  “Is that all?” she asked regretfully.

Gabriella laughed happily.  “That is all—­only I found out exactly what I wanted to know.”

For the rest of the week she devoted herself to her mother with a solicitude which aroused in the brain of that melancholy lady serious apprehensions of a hastening decline; and when her visit was over, she packed her trunks, with girlish, delicious thrills of happiness, and started back to New York.

“Do you really think I am failing so rapidly, Gabriella?” Mrs. Carr inquired anxiously while they waited for the train on the platform of the upper station.

“Failing?  Why, no, mother.  You look splendidly,” Gabriella assured her, a little surprised, a little startled.  “Why should you ask me such a thing?”

“Oh, nothing, dear.  I had a fancy,” murmured Mrs. Carr meekly; and then as the train rushed into view, she kissed her daughter reproachfully, and stood gazing after her until the last coach and the last white jacket of the dining-car attendants vanished in the smoky sunshine of the distance.

Through the long day, lying back in her chair, with her eyes on the flying green landscape, Gabriella thought of the discovery she had made while she was driving with Arthur.  The restlessness, the uncertainty, the vague yet poignant longing for an indefinite good, had passed out of her happy and exultant heart.  In obedience to the law of her nature, which decreed that she should move swiftly and directly toward the end of her destiny, she was returning to O’Hara as resolutely, as unswervingly, as she had fled from him.

“It’s strange how little I’ve ever understood, how little I’ve ever known myself,” she thought, staring vacantly at a severe spinster, with crimped hair and a soured expression, who sat before the opposite window.  “I’ve gone on in the dark, making mistakes and discoveries from the very beginning, undoing and doing over again, creating illusions and then destroying them—­always moving, always changing, always growing in new directions.