“Why should I stop?”

The form before him had sunk into a chair.  Both its hands were clasped over the miniature.  He heard the same strange voice like the wailing cry of a child: 

“Because I am the woman he loved—­because I loved him.”

CHAPTER XXVII.

GABRIEL AT HOME.

During all this time Gabriel Bennet is becoming a merchant.  Every morning he arrives at the store with the porter or before him.  He helps him sweep and dust; and it is Gabriel who puts Lawrence Newt’s room in order, laying the papers in place, and taking care of the thousand nameless details that make up comfort.  He reads the newspapers before the other clerks arrive, and sits upon chests of tea or bales of matting in the loft, that fill the air with strange, spicy, Oriental odors, and talks with the porter.  In the long, warm afternoons, too, when there is no pressure of business, and the heat is overpowering, he sits also alone among those odors, and his mind is busy with all kinds of speculations, and dreams, and hopes.

As he walks up Broadway toward evening, his clear, sweet eyes see every thing that floats by.  He does not know the other side of the fine dresses he meets any more than of the fine houses, with the smiling, glittering windows.  The sun shines bright in his eyes—­the street is gay—­he nods to his friends—­he admires the pretty faces—­he wonders at the fast men driving fast horses—­he sees the flowers in the windows, the smiling faces between the muslin curtains—­he gazes with a kind of awe at the funerals going by, and marks the white bands of the clergymen and the physicians—­the elm-trees in the hospital yard remind him of the woods at Delafield; and here comes Abel Newt, laughing, chatting, smoking, with an arm in the arms of two other young men, who are also smoking.  As Gabriel passes Abel their eyes meet.  Abel nods airily, and Gabriel quietly; the next moment they are back to back again—­one is going up street, the other down.

It is not one of the splendid houses before which Gabriel stops when he has reached the upper part of the city.  It is not a palace, nor is it near Broadway.  Nor are there curtains at the window, but a pair of smiling faces, of friendly women’s faces.  One is mild and maternal, with that kind of tender anxiety which softens beauty instead of hardening it.  It has that look which, after she is dead, every affectionate son thinks he remembers to have seen in his mother’s face; and the other is younger, brighter—­a face of rosy cheeks, and clustering hair, and blue eyes—­a beaming, loyal, loving, girlish face.