“I know you don’t understand my forgiving him, Gabriella,” she said very gently, “but some day, after you are married, you will realize that I do it from a sacred duty—­from a sacred duty,” she repeated firmly, while the shining light of martyrdom illumined her features.

“Well, it’s none of my business,” answered Gabriella crossly, “but the sooner you do it, I suppose the sooner you will have to do it again.”  If only for once Jane would be direct, if only she would be natural, if only she would speak the truth and not fiction.

“Oh, no, dear, you don’t understand him any better than you do me,” said Jane as sweetly as ever in spite of Gabriella’s deplorable loss of temper.  “He is really dreadfully penitent, and he sees that he hasn’t always treated me as he ought to have done.  But you’ll know what I mean when you marry, Gabriella.  She’ll understand me then, won’t she, mother?”

“I’m sometimes tempted to hope that Gabriella will never marry,” replied Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; “the Carrs all seem to marry so badly.”

In her normal mood she would never have uttered this heresy, for she belonged to a generation that regarded even a bad marriage as better for a woman than no marriage at all; but the night had worn her out, and one of her spells of neuralgia, which followed fatigue, was already beginning in her face.  The purple crocheted “fascinator” she had caught up at the doctor’s entrance was still on her head, and her long pale face, beneath the airy scallops, appeared frozen in an expression of incurable melancholy.  For the rest she had been too frightened, too forgetful of herself and her own comfort even to put on her stockings, though Gabriella had begged her to do so.  “Don’t think about me.  Attend to poor Jane,” she had repeated over and over.

“Mother, go into my room and get into bed,” commanded Gabriella, whose patience, never abundant, was ebbing low.  “If you don’t get some sleep your neuralgia won’t be any better.”

“It isn’t any better.  I don’t expect it to be any better.”

“Well, you must go to bed or it will get worse.  I’ll heat you a cup of milk and wrap you up in warm blankets.”

“Don’t worry about me, dear.  Think of poor Jane.”

“We’ve been thinking of Jane all night, and you need it now more than she does.  I can tell by your eyes how you are suffering.”

In the first streak of dawn, which was beginning to glimmer faintly on the window-panes, Mrs. Carr looked as if she had withered overnight.

“It’s only my left temple,” she said dully, “otherwise I am quite well.  No, dear, I must rub Jane’s forehead until she falls asleep.  The doctor said it was important that we should keep her soothed.”

But it was a law of Gabriella’s nature that she never knew when she was beaten.  Failure aroused the sleeping forces within her, and when these forces were once liberated, the spasmodic efforts of Mrs. Carr and the indirect methods of Jane were alike powerless to oppose them.  At such times a faint flush rose to her pale cheeks, her eyes shone with a burning darkness, while her mouth lost its fresh young red and grew hard in outline.