“That’s the girl he told me about,” said Gabriella.  “Was he ever interested in her?”

“Not for a minute.  We’re awfully contrary about our love affairs.  We will marry for love—­even mother did though she may have forgotten it.  We never marry the people—­” She clipped off the sentence, but Gabriella caught it up with a laugh: 

“I know,” she said gaily, “you never marry the people your family pick out for you.”

“Well, of course, Billy went dreadfully hard with them—­at least with mother.  She wanted the Duke of Somewhere so very badly.  But it was Billy or nobody for me.  I’d have married Billy,” she added while her beautiful face grew stern, “if I’d had to walk all the way across the world to him.”

“He looks as if he were worth it,” admitted Gabriella.

“He is, but that probably wasn’t my reason for marrying him.  One never knows why one marries, I suppose, unless one marries for money and then it is so beautifully simple.  Now, you and George don’t seem a bit alike, but it all happened on the spur of the moment, didn’t it?”

“It always seems that way when one looks back, doesn’t it?” asked Gabriella.  “But what I can’t understand”—­she brought it out with a frown—­“is why marriage doesn’t change one.  I used to think I’d be different, but I’m not.  And even love seems to leave people wanting everything else just as badly.  Your mother has had a perfect love—­she told me so—­and yet it hasn’t kept her from wanting all the other things in life, has it?  I wish I could work it out,” she finished, a little sadly, for she was thinking of her mother’s cry on the night of Jane’s attack:  “I am tempted to hope Gabriella will never marry.  The Carrs all marry so badly!” Why had those words come back to her to-night?  She had not remembered them for months, she had even forgotten that she had heard them, and now they floated to her as clearly as if they had been spoken aloud.

In a little while Billy came in, and when, after a few moments of spasmodic affability, Mrs. Crowborough rose and pleaded an early board meeting on the morrow, Gabriella watched Patty wrap her honey-coloured head in a white scarf and then stand, waiting for a cab, in the doorway.  Happiness, with so many people an invisible attribute, encircled Patty like a garment of light.  It crowned her white brow under the glory of her hair; it shone in her eyes; it rippled in her smile; it lingered in a beam of sunshine on her lips.  With her arm in Billy’s she looked back laughing from the steps, and it seemed to Gabriella that all the brightness of life was going with them into the darkness.  Beside the curbstone an old cab horse, dazzled by the light from the door, turned his head slowly toward them; and the look in his eyes, wistful, questioning, expectant, seemed to say, “This is not life, but a miracle.”  And from his box the red-cheeked, wheezy Irish driver gazed down on Patty with the same wistfulness, the same questioning, the same expectancy.