“I believe she’d feel at home anywhere,” replied Miss Meason, “and she’s obliged to get on.  There’s no doubt of it.”

“A pleasant face, too.  Not exactly pretty, I suppose, but you would call it a pleasant face.”

“Oh, well, I’d call her pretty in her way,” answered Miss Meason.  “Her eyes are lovely, and she has a singularly bright expression.  I always say that a bright expression makes up for anything.”

“Her mother was a beauty in her day,” said Mr. Brandywine reminiscently; “she was the snow and roses sort, and her eldest daughter took after her, though she is a wreck now, poor lady.”

“That’s Charley Gracey,” remarked Miss Meason tartly, for she had the self-supporting woman’s contempt for the rake.  “Yes, she was lovely as a girl.  I remember as well as if it were yesterday how happy she looked when I sold her her wedding gloves.  She is a beautiful character, too, they say, but somehow Gabriella, even as a child, appealed to me more.  She has three times the sense of her sister.”

Then they shook hands and parted, while Gabriella, tripping through the Second Market, was saying to herself:  “There’s not the least bit of sense in your thinking about him, Gabriella.”

In Hill Street, maple and poplar trees were in full leaf, and little flakes of sunshine, as soft as flowers, were scattered over the brick pavement.  Beyond the housetops the sky was golden, and at the corner the rusty ironwork of an old balcony had turned to the colour of bronze.  The burning light of the sunset blinded her eyes, while an intense sweetness came to her from the honeysuckle clambering over a low white porch; and this light and this sweetness possessed an ineffable quality.  Life, which had been merely placid a few hours before, had become suddenly poignant—­every instant was pregnant with happiness, every detail was piercingly vivid.  Her whole being was flooded with a sensation of richness and wonder, as if she had awakened with surprise to a different world from the one she had closed her eyes on a minute before.

As she crossed the street she saw her mother’s head above a box of clove pinks in the window; and a little later the front door opened and Miss Polly Hatch, a small, indomitable spinster who sewed out by the day, walked rapidly between the iron urns and stopped under the creamy blossoms of the old magnolia tree in the yard.

“It’s too late for your ma to be workin’, Gabriella.  You’d better stop her.”

Pausing in the middle of the walk, she comfortably tucked under her arm an unwieldy bundle she carried, and added, with the shrewdness which was the result of a long and painful experience with human nature:  “It’s funny—­ain’t it?—­how downright mulish your ma can be when she wants to?”

“I can’t do a thing on earth with her,” answered Gabriella in distress.  “You have more influence over her than I have, Miss Polly.”

Miss Polly, who had the composed and efficient bearing of a machine, shook her head discouragingly as she opened the gate and passed out.