“No.”

“Did you get out for a walk?”

“No.”

The appalling silence again filled the room like a fog, and Gabriella, moving cautiously about in it, began straightening chairs and picking up shreds of cambric from the carpet.  She felt suddenly that she could not endure the strain for another minute, and glancing at Mrs. Carr’s bent head, where the thin hair was wound into a tight knot and held in place by a tortoise-shell comb with a carved top, she wondered how her mother could possibly keep it up day after day as she did?  But, if she had only known it, this silence, which tried her nerves to the breaking point, was positively soothing to her mother.  Mrs. Carr could keep it up not only for days and weeks, but, had it been necessary, she could have kept it up with equal success for half a lifetime.  While she sat there, working buttonholes in a bad light, she thought quite as passionately as Gabriella, though her mental processes were different.  She thought sadly, but firmly, with a pensive melancholy not untinged with pleasure, that “life was becoming almost too much for her.”  It seemed incredible to her that after all her struggles to keep up an appearance things should have turned out as they had; it seemed incredible that after all her sacrifices her children should not consider her more.  “They have no consideration for me,” she reflected, while she took the finest stitch possible to the needle she held.  “If Jane had considered me she would never have married Charley.  If Gabriella had considered me, or anybody but herself, she would not have gone to work in a store.”  No, they had never considered her, they had never asked her advice before acting, though she had brought them into the world and had worked like a slave in order to keep them in that respected station of life in which they had been born.  Then, her sorrow getting the better of her resolution, she turned her head and spoke: 

“I know you never tell me anything on purpose, Gabriella, but I think I have a right to know whether or not you have discarded Arthur for good.”

“I told you all about it, mother.  I told you I found I was mistaken.”

“I suppose you never thought for a moment how much it would distress me?  Though Lydia Peyton is so much older than I am, she was always my best friend—­we often stayed in the room together when we were girls.  I had set my heart on your marrying her son.”

“I know that, mother, and I am very sorry, but when it came to the point I couldn’t marry him.  You can’t make yourself care—­”

“I should have thought that my wishes might influence you.  I should never wish you to do anything that wasn’t for your good, Gabriella.”

“Of course, mother, you’ve given up your life to us.  I know that, and Jane knows it as well as I do.  That’s why I want to earn money enough to let you rest.  I want you to stop work for good and be happy.”

“There are worse things than work,” replied Mrs. Carr in a tone which implied that Gabriella had brought them upon her.