“You must go to bed, mother,” she repeated in a voice which Mrs. Carr would have obeyed had it issued from the wall or a piece of furniture.

Fifteen minutes later Gabriella stood authoritatively beside the bed, while her mother, with a mustard plaster at the back of her neck, obediently sipped hot milk from a teacup.  Mrs. Carr had surrendered to the conquering spirit of her daughter, but her surrender, which was unwilling and weakly defiant, gave out presently a last feeble flicker of resistance.

“Don’t you think, Gabriella, we might arrange to live with Jane?” she asked.  “It would be a saving of expense for us both, and we might be so helpful about the children.”

“And about Charley, too, I suppose,” suggested Gabriella maliciously.

Mrs. Carr, having been born without a sense of humour, never understood the broadest joke unless it was illustrated; but even to her it became evident, after a moment’s anxious thought, that Gabriella was teasing her.

“You seem to forget that he is her husband,” she replied, with a pathetic clutch at her dignity, which, owing perhaps to the purple “fascinator” and the mustard plaster, she failed completely to recapture.  Then, as she finished the milk and handed back the empty cup to her daughter, she added wearily, for life, as she often said to herself of late, was becoming almost too much for her, and she was feeling worn out and old: 

“My one comfort, Gabriella, is the thought that Arthur Peyton loves you.  There couldn’t be anybody more unlike Charley.”

“There couldn’t be,” agreed Gabriella mildly, for she felt that another blow would prostrate her mother.

CHAPTER III

A START IN LIFE

In the late ’seventies and early ’eighties the most important shop in the town of Gabriella’s birth was known to its patrons (chiefly ladies in long basques, tightly tied back skirts, and small eccentric bonnets) as Brandywine & Plummer’s drygoods store.  At that period, when old Mrs. Carr, just completing her ninetieth year with a mind fixed upon heaven, would have dropped dead at the idea that her granddaughter should ever step out of her class, Gabriella’s mother bought her dresses (grosgrain of the very best quality) from Major Brandywine.  To be sure, even in those days, there were other shops in the city—­for was not Broad Street already alluded to in the newspapers as “the shopping thoroughfare of the South?”—­but, though they were as numerous as dandelions in June, these places were by no means patronized so widely by “the best people.”  Small shops, of course, carrying a single line of goods and supplying their particular products to an exacting and discriminating class, held their own even against the established reputation of Brandywine & Plummer’s.  O’Connell’s linen store, Twitlow’s china store, Mrs. Tonk’s doll store, and Green & Brady’s store for notions—­all