“I’ll remember.  Is there any one else?”

“Mrs. Crowborough, of course, and Colonel Buffington, and one or two others.  Nobody that you will care for except the judge and Patty and Billy.”

“I shan’t forget, but I may be a little late getting home.  Good-bye, my dear, until evening.”

Bending over her chair, he kissed her flushed cheek, while George remarked carelessly:  “I’ll see you later, father, when I’ve had a bath and a shave.”

After the gentle tones of Mr. Fowler, the vitality of George’s voice sounded almost brutal, and he added just as carelessly when the front door had shut softly:  “The old man looks seedy, doesn’t he, mother?”

A worried look brought out three startling lines in Mrs. Fowler’s forehead, and Gabriella observed suddenly that there were tiny crow’s feet around her blue eyes where the whites were flecked ever so faintly with yellow.  Though she was well into the mid-fifties, her carefully preserved skin had kept the firmness and the texture of youth, and she still flushed easily and unbecomingly as she had done as a girl.

“He hasn’t been a bit well, George.  I am very anxious about him.  You know when he worries over his business, he doesn’t eat his meals, and as soon as he stops eating he begins to have nervous dyspepsia.  He has just had a bad attack; that’s why he looks so run down and haggard.”

“Can’t the doctor do anything for him?”

“He gave him some drops, but it is so hard to get your father to take medicine.  Rest is what he needs, and, of course, that is out of the question while things are so unsettled.  You must help him all you can, my boy, and Gabriella and I will manage with each other’s company.”

Her bright smile was still on her lips, but Gabriella noticed that she pushed her buttered roll away as if she were choking.

In the early afternoon, when George had gone to join his father in the office, and Gabriella, seated at a little white and gold desk in the room which had been Patty’s, was just finishing a letter to her mother, Mrs. Fowler came in, and pushing a chintz-covered chair close to the desk, sank into it and laid her small nervous hand on the arm of her daughter-in-law.  She was wearing a velvet bonnet, with strings, and a street gown of black broadcloth, which fitted her like a glove and accentuated, after the fashion of the ’nineties, her small, compact waist and the deep substantial curves of her bosom and hips.  Her eyes, behind the little veil of spotted tulle which reached to the tip of her nose, were bright and wistful, and though her colour was too high, a smile of troubled sweetness lent it a peculiar charm of expression.

“How nice you look, my dear,” she said, with her pleasant manner, which no anxiety, hardly any grief, could dispel.  “Are you very busy, or may I talk to you a little while?”

Drawing closer to her, Gabriella raised the plump little hand to her lips.  Beneath the surface pleasantness of Mrs. Fowler’s life—­that pleasantness which wrapped her like a religion—­she was beginning to discern a deep disquietude.