“That’s a pretty dress, my dear.  I never saw you look better.”

“She’s really getting pretty,” remarked Mrs. Carr.  “Cousin Jimmy was saying only yesterday that if Gabriella keeps it up, she’ll be a better looking old lady than Jane.”

“Well, I think her a very pretty young one,” replied Mrs. Peyton.  “She hasn’t such small features as Jane has, but there is more in her face.  Now, I’m willing to wager that George thinks her a beauty.”

Gabriella laughed happily.  “He hasn’t the faintest idea what I look like, but he declares he won’t be a bit disappointed if he finds out some day that I am ugly.”

The glow of youth, of hope, of love, gave to her expressive face an almost unearthly brightness.  She seemed to draw to her all that was vital and alive in the dim old house, so filled with memories, and in the October pageantry of the garden.  It was the day of her miracle, and against the splendour of the scarlet sage, she shone with an unforgettable radiance.

When, a little later, Mrs. Carr, in Cousin Jimmy’s buggy, with her bunch of chrysanthemums held rigidly in her lap, drove off at an amble to Hollywood, and Gabriella, turning to wave her hand, had vanished behind the corner of the gray wall, Mrs. Peyton said gently: 

“She looked very happy, dear boy.  You and I must pray for her happiness.”

The beauty which all her life she had created through faith awoke in Arthur’s suffering heart while she spoke to him.  She demanded nobility of being, and it existed; she exacted generosity of nature, and it was there.  By her mere presence, by the overflowing love in her heart, she not only banished jealousy and envy, but made the very idea of them unthinkable.

“She is obliged to be happy.  It is her nature,” answered Arthur, for his disposition was hardly less perfect than his manner.

Crossing Broad Street, which wore its look of Sabbath sleepiness, Gabriella hurried on to Hill Street, and saw George waiting for her between the two green-painted urns filled with the summer’s fading bloom of portulaca.

He was staring straight upward at one of the poplar trees, where a gray squirrel was playing among the branches, and for several minutes before he was aware of her presence, she watched him with her impassioned, yet not wholly uncritical, gaze.  The sunlight sparkled in his eyes, which shone brightly blue against the red brown of his flesh; and between his smiling lips, which were thick and somewhat loosely moulded, she saw the gleaming whiteness of his teeth.  She could not explain—­she had never even tried to understand—­why this face, which was not in the least a remarkable one, should so profoundly appeal to her.  When George was absent, his look haunted her with the intensity of an hallucination; when at last she saw it again, she felt that nothing else in the world mattered to her, so supreme was the contentment that swept over her.  Though she was more intelligent than Jane, not even Jane herself had surrendered so unconditionally to the primal force.  At least Jane had made exactions, but so complete was the subjugation of Gabriella that she exacted nothing, not even a return of her love.  To give was all she asked, and in the giving she bloomed into a beauty and fullness of nature which Jane’s small, closed soul could never attain.