I think.  Billy has painted a portrait of Mrs. Pletheridge, but it isn’t a bit flattering, and he wouldn’t let her wear her pearls, so I’m afraid she won’t buy it.  I don’t believe he will ever make anything of himself.  What a waste when Patty might have been Duchess of Toxbridge.  Though I am not a bit worldly, I can’t help regretting all that she has lost.

     Your loving mother,

     Evelyn Fowler.

When she had folded the letter and given it back to him, Gabriella dropped her hands in her lap and sat gazing thoughtfully at the square of sunlight by the window.

“If you cared as much as I do, you’d be willing to give up your family,” he said suddenly, encouraged not only by her manner, which appeared yielding, but by his secret ineradicable conviction that her love was greater than his.  Across the romantic screen of his features there flashed a swift change of expression, like the flicker of light on a coloured mask.  If she could only have looked through the charming vacancy of his face, she would have been surprised to discover the directness and simplicity of his mental processes.  He wanted his way, and he meant, provided it was humanly possible, to have whatever he wanted.

“It isn’t that, George.  Love has nothing to do with it.  It is a question of right.”

For a minute he surveyed her moodily; then, rising from her side on the sofa, he took two steps to the window and looked up at the boughs of the poplar tree.  The gray squirrel was still there, and he watched it attentively while he pondered his answer.  Yes, the whole trouble with Gabriella was too much conscience.  This conscience of hers had got in his way before now, and he had suddenly an uneasy feeling, as if he had struck against the vein of iron which lay beneath the rich bloom of her passion.  The thought of her opposition, of her secret hardness, bitterly angered him.  He wanted her—­no other woman could satisfy him—­but he wanted her utterly different from what she was.  He was seized with an indomitable desire to make her over, to change her entirely from that Gabriella with whom he had fallen in love.  Of course, she was right as far as the mere facts of the case were concerned.  He had promised that her mother should live with them; but he felt indignantly that it was an act of disloyalty for her to be right at his expense.  She ought to have given in, and she ought to have given in gracefully, there was no question of that.  When a woman loved a man as much as she loved him, it was unreasonable of her to let these innumerable little points of fact come between them; it was ungenerous of her to cling so stubbornly to her advantage.  Her very quietness—­that look of gentle obstinacy which refused either to fight back or to surrender—­irritated him almost to desperation.  His temper, always inflammable, suddenly burst out, and he felt that he wanted to shake her.  He wanted, indeed, to do anything in the world except the sensible thing of walking out of the house and leaving her to reflection.