“George,” she said presently, while she loosened her hair, “your father told me you didn’t stay more than an hour in the office.”  The question, “What were you doing?” rose to her lips, but she strangled the words before they escaped her.  Her mind was quick to grasp facts, and she had learned already something of a man’s instinctive dislike to being made to give an account of himself.

“You’ve been hearing too much gossip to-night,” he rejoined gaily.  “Take care what you listen to.”

“Don’t joke, dear.  I wish you would tell me things.”

“There isn’t anything to tell, is there?”

“Is your father very rich?”

“Not very.  Did you think you were marrying a millionaire?”

“I never thought about it, but everybody at home thinks he has a great deal of money, and yet your mother talks as if she were poor.”

“Well, he made a pile of money in a big deal about ten years ago, and the papers had a lot about it.  After that he lost it, or most of it, and the papers didn’t tell.  The fact is, he’s always either making or losing, and now he’s losing.  That’s why they wanted me to put off our marriage.”

“They wanted you to put it off?”

“Mother did—­the old man never interferes.  She had got into her head, you see, that the only way for me to make a living was to marry one, so it was a little while before she could get used to the idea that I was going to marry because I wanted to, not because my family wanted me to.  She was a brick though when she found out I was in earnest.  Mother is true blue when you know how to take her.”

“But you never told me.”

“You bet I didn’t.  If I had, as likely as not, you would be Gabriella Mary Carr at this minute.”

Drawing gently out of his grasp, which had grown possessive, she stood looking at him with a smile in which tenderness and irony mingled; and the tenderness was her own, while the irony seemed to belong to the vision of an impersonal spectator of life.  The smile fascinated him.  He could not withdraw his gaze from it, and yet it had the disturbing effect of placing her at an emotional distance.

“Your mother is very good to me,” she said, “but I feel somehow as if I had taken an unfair advantage of her.  And you hadn’t even told her,” she added, “that we are going to take an apartment in June.”

“Oh, that’s all right—­there’s plenty of time,” he responded irritably.  “Only you mustn’t make mountains out of molehills.”

Then, because she dreaded his anger, she gave up her point as she had given up many before.  He was irresponsible, but he was hers and she loved him.

“I am so sleepy,” she said, stifling a yawn, “that I feel as if I could cry.”

Marriage, at the end of a month, had already disciplined the fearless directness of Gabriella.  She had learned not to answer back when she knew she was right; she had learned to appear sweet when her inner spirit demanded a severe exterior; she had learned to hold her tongue when a veritable torrent of words rose to her lips.  And these lessons, which George’s temper and her own reason had taught her, remained with her in the future, long after she had forgotten George and the severity of her schooling.