“I’ve saved you a little cream.  Shall I make you a toddy?”

“I don’t want it.  Drink it yourself, dear.”

After this there followed one of those pauses which fill not only the room, but the universe with a fury of sound.  There were times when Gabriella felt that she could stand anything if only her mother would fly into a rage—­when she positively envied Florrie Spencer because her plebeian parent scolded her at the top of her voice instead of maintaining a calm and ladylike reticence.  But Mrs. Carr was one of those women who never, even in the most trying circumstances, cease to be patient, who never lose for an instant so much as the palest or the thinnest of the Christian virtues.

Going into the bedroom, Gabriella changed from her shirtwaist into a gown of flowered muslin, with sleeves that looked small beside the balloon ones of the season, and a skirt which was shrunken and pale from many washings the summer before.  She had worn the frock when she met George, and though it was old, she knew it was becoming, and she told herself joyfully that if she put it on to-night, “something must come of it.”  As she smoothed her hair by the dim gas-jet over the mirror, she saw again the face of George as it had first smiled down on her beneath the boughs of a mimosa tree in Mrs. Spencer’s front garden.  At the time, a year ago, she was engaged to Arthur—­she had even called the placid preference she felt for him “being in love”—­but while she talked to George she had found herself thinking, “I wonder how it would feel to be engaged to a man like this instead of to Arthur?” Then, since all Southern engagements of the period were secret, she had seen a good deal of George during the summer; and in the autumn, while she was still trying to make believe that it was merely a friendship, he had gone back to New York without saying good-bye.  She had tried her best to stop thinking of him, and until this evening, she had never really let herself confess that she cared.  But if she didn’t care why was she so happy to-night?  If she didn’t care why was there such intoxicating sweetness in the thought of his return?  If she didn’t care why had she dressed herself so carefully in the flowered muslin he had once said that he liked?  Her face, smiling back at her from the mirror, was suffused with a delicate glow—­not pink, not white, but softly luminous as if a lamp, shining behind it, enkindled its expression.  She had never seen herself so nearly pretty, and with this thought in her mind, she went back to her mother, who was still working buttonholes under the chandelier.

“Marthy has brought the lamp, mother.  Why don’t you move over to the table?”

“I can see perfectly, thank you, Gabriella.”

“I hate to see you working.  Let me finish those buttonholes.”

“I’d rather get through them myself, dear.”

“Have you seen Jane to-day?”

“No.”

“Has Cousin Pussy been here?”