“Well, we’d better look at it again in the morning.  You are in a hurry, Miss Carr?”

“Oh, no, I’ve all the time in the world,” answered Gabriella, though she longed to be out with the June scents and her dreams, “but I am sure the ribbon ought to be a deeper blue to tone with the ragged robins.”

“You’ve a wonderful eye for colour, that’s why I ask your advice,” said the other, and a sudden friendliness shone in her tired eyes, for she had liked Gabriella from the beginning.  That the girl possessed a genuine gift of taste, the elder woman had already discovered.  For herself, Miss Lancaster had always hated the sight of hats, and had taken up the work merely because a place in Brandywine & Plummer’s had been offered her shortly after her father, a gallant fighter but a poor worker, had gone to end his kindly anecdotal days in the Home for Confederate Soldiers.  She was a repressed, conscientious woman, who had never been younger than she was now at fifty, and who regarded youth, not with envy, but with admiring awe.  For she, also, patient and uncomplaining creature, belonged to that world of decay and inertia from which Gabriella had revolted.  It was a world where things happened to-day just as they happened yesterday, where no miracles had occurred since the miracles of Scripture, where people hated change, not because they were satisfied, but because they were incapable of imagination.  Miss Lancaster, who had never wanted anything with passion, except to be a perfect lady, was proud of the fact that she had been twenty years in business without losing her “shrinking manner.”

“Yes, you have an eye for colour,” she repeated gently; “if you could only learn to sew, you might command a most desirable position.”

“I despise sewing,” replied Gabriella, with serene good-humour, “and I could never learn, even at school, anything that I despised.  But I suppose I can always tell somebody else how it ought to be done.”

Then, because her work always interested her, she forgot the disturbing words Mrs. Spencer had spoken—­she forgot even her impatience to feel the June air in her face.  Her best gift, the power of mental control, enabled her to bring the needed discipline to her emotion; and when the moment of her release came, she found that the brief restlessness had passed from her mind.  “There’s no use letting myself get impatient,” she thought; “I’ve got to stick to it, so it won’t do a bit of good to begin wriggling.”

All the other girls had gone home before her, and on the sidewalk Miss Meason, of the glove counter, stood talking about the spring sales to Mr. Brandywine.  As Gabriella passed them, in her white shirtwaist and dark belted skirt, they looked thoughtfully after her until her sailor hat, with the scarlet band, crossed Broad Street and disappeared on the opposite side.

“She’s a remarkable girl,” observed Mr. Brandywine, with his paternal manner.  “I hope she is beginning to feel at home with us.”