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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. "I want to talk to you, mamma," she said, and her manner was a caress. "You love George very much, dear?" asked Mrs.
Spencer told herself that the girl looked almost pretty for a minute. "If she wasn't so sallow, she'd be really good looking." Happily unaware that her face had betrayed her, Gabriella slid back a glass door, took a hat out of the case, and answered indifferently, while she adjusted the ribbon bow on one side of the crown: "I didn't know Mr. Fowler had come back. I haven't seen him for ages."
What was his family, how he stood in his profession, his honorable character, his manners, his manhood these were what Gabriella had always been taught to look for first in a man. In many other ways than in his faith and doubt David was a new type of man to her.
The children, who had most of them been my fellow pupils, looked upon Gabriella Lynn, the protégée of the rich Mrs. Linwood, as a different being from Gabriella Lynn of the little gray cottage in the woods. I have no doubt they thought it very grand to ride on that beautiful pony, with its saddle-cloth of blue and silver, and glittering martingale, escorted by a servant too!
The front door opened suddenly, and the man came out again, and, descended the walk with the springy step Gabriella had noticed at their first meeting. Notwithstanding his size, he moved with the lightness and agility of a boy, and without looking at him she could see, as she bent over the flower-bed, that he had the look of exuberant vitality which accompanies perfect physical condition.
Pletheridge so graciously that Gabriella would hardly have recognized her. Something sleep, pleasure, or pious meditation had altered overnight not only her temper but even the fleshly vehicle of its uncertain manifestations. Her features appeared to have adjusted themselves to the size of her face, and she spoke quite affably, though still with her manner of addressing an inferior.
Clyde was called to attend a dying father, who lived in this town, Gabriella, not very far from the little cottage in the woods where I first knew you. He took my mother and myself with him, for she was in feeble health, and he thought the journey would invigorate her. It did not. A child of sunny France, she languished under the bleaker New England skies.
These drives alone with her grandmother were for spring and early summer only. Full summer brought up from their plantations in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi, her uncles and the wives and children of some of them. All the bedrooms in the big house were filled, and Gabriella was nearly lost in the multitude, she being the only child of the only daughter of her grandmother.
She could not tell how she had altered, and yet she felt perfectly conscious that an alteration had taken place in her soul that she was not the same Gabriella that life could never be again exactly as it had been before. Nothing and yet everything seemed to have happened to her in a day.
The yard was neglected and overgrown with dandelions and wire-grass; but an old rose-bush by the steps was in full bloom, and already Miss Polly was surveying the tangled weeds with the eye of a destroyer. "I declare I'm just hungerin' for flowers," she said wistfully, following the dining-room table as far as the foot of the steps where Gabriella stood.
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