“I should think your first duty would be to your husband,” he said, while the streak of cruelty which was at the heart of his love showed like a livid mark on the surface of his nature.  His mind was conscious of but a single thought while he stood there in the wind which fluttered the curtains and filled the room with the roving scents of October, and this was the bitter longing to make Gabriella over into the girl that he wanted her to become.  Though it cost him her love, he felt that he must punish her for being herself.

“Do you mean always to put your mother before me?” he asked passionately, after a minute.

Still she did not answer, and in the deep, earnest eyes that she turned on him he saw not anger, not sorrow even, but wonder.  As he stretched out his hand, it fell on Mrs. Carr’s window box, where a rose geranium remained bright green in the midst of the withered stems of the clove pinks, and the scent of the leaves, as he crushed them between his fingers, evoked a swift memory of Gabriella in one of her soft moods, saying over and over, “I love you!  Oh, I do love you!” At the image his temper changed as if by magic, and crossing the room, he bent down and kissed her with a fierceness that bruised her lips.

“I adore you, Gabriella,” he said.

Though she had seen these sudden changes in him before, she had never grown wholly used to them.  Her deeper nature, with its tranquil brightness, untroubled by passing storms, was unprepared for the shallow violence which swept over him, leaving no visible trace of its passage.  No, she could not understand him—­she could only hope that after they were married the blindness would pass from her love, and she would attain that completer knowledge for which she was striving so patiently.  The transforming miracle of marriage, she trusted, would reveal this mystery, with so many others.

“How can you hurt me so, George?” she asked with reproachful tenderness.

“It’s because you are so stubborn, darling.  If you weren’t so stubborn I shouldn’t do it.  Do you know you get almost mulish at times,” he added, laughing, while she moved nearer and rubbed her cheek softly against his sleeve.

“You frighten me,” she whispered.  “I was just beginning to believe that you really meant it.”

“Oh, lovers always quarrel.  There’s nothing in that.”

“But I hate to see you angry.  It would almost kill me if it lasted longer than a minute.  Never let it last, will you, George?”

“Of course not, Goosey.  It never has lasted, has it?”

“Goosey” was one of his favourite names for her.  He liked it because it gave him a merry feeling of superiority when he said it, and Gabriella liked it for perhaps the same reason.  In the first ardour of her self-surrender she caught eagerly at any straw that she might cast on the flame of her passion.

“And I’m not really stubborn, dear.  Tell me that I’m not really stubborn.”