But in the last few weeks even this anxiety had faded from her mind, for the miracle of life which stirred in her body had diffused its golden halo around every trivial incident of her existence.  After days of physical wretchedness, which she had hidden from George, she sat one evening, utterly at peace, in front of the fire in the room which had been Patty’s before her marriage.  It was past midnight, and she was waiting for George to come home because she felt that she could not sleep until she had told him.  In the morning he had been unusually gentle, and as he left the house, she had said to herself a little sternly that he must know about the child before the day was over.  A secret consultation with her mother-in-law had strengthened her resolution.  “Don’t keep it from him another day, Gabriella,” Mrs. Fowler had urged.  “It will make such a difference.  I shall never forget Archibald’s joy when I told him George was coming.  Men are like that about children, you know.”

“Yes, I’ll tell him to-night,” Gabriella had answered; and sitting now in the rocking-chair by the fire, she began to wonder if George would be exactly like other men about children.

The house was very still, but even in its stillness it exhaled the nervous apprehension which she felt to be its living character—­as if George’s parents, sleeping two doors away, had dropped their guard for the night, and allowed their anxious thoughts the freedom of the halls until daybreak.  And these thoughts, which had become like invisible presences to the girl, wandered up and down the dim staircase, where the lowered lights awaited George’s return, invaded the drawing-room, filled with stuffy red velvet chairs, so like crouching human beings in the darkness, and even thronged about her threshold, ready to spring inside at the instant when George should open the door.  While her fire burned brightly on the andirons, and rosy shadows danced on the white rug beside her bed, on the lace coverlet turned back for the night, on the deep pillows with their azure lining showing through the delicate linen of the slips, on her simple nightdress, in which the buttonholes were so beautifully worked by her mother,—­while she looked at these things it was easy for her to shut out the apprehensions of yesterday.  But these apprehensions would come with George and they would not go until George left her again.  The house with its heavy late-Victorian furniture, its velvet carpets which muffled footsteps, its thick curtains which hid doorways, its red walls, its bevelled mirrors, its substantial and costly ornaments, its solid paintings in solid frames—­the house and all that it contained diffused for Gabriella an inescapable atmosphere, and this atmosphere was like the one in which she had waited expectantly in her childhood for the roof to be sold over her head.  Now, as then, she waited for something to happen, and this something was a fact of dread, a shape of terror, which must be ignored as long as its impending