deserted street where the slender shadows of poplar trees slanted over
the wet cobblestones. Though Mrs. Carr worked every instant of her time,
except the few hours when she lay in bed trying to sleep, and the few
minutes when she sat at the table trying to eat, nothing that she began
was ever finished until Gabriella took it out of her hands. She did her
best, for she was as conscientious in her way as poor Jane, yet through
some tragic perversity of fate her best seemed always to fall short of
the simplest requirements of life. Her face, like Jane's, was long and
thin, with a pathetic droop at the corners of the mouth, a small bony
nose, always slightly reddened at the tip, and faded blue eyes beneath
an even row of little flat round curls which looked as if they were
plastered on her forehead.

Thirty-three years before, in the romantic and fiery 'sixties, she had
married dashing young Gabriel Carr for no better reason apparently than
that she was falling vaguely in love with love; and the marriage, which
had been one of reckless passion on his side, had been for her scarcely
more than the dreamer's hesitating compromise with reality. Passion,
which she had been taught to regard as an unholy attribute implanted by
the Creator, with inscrutable wisdom, in the nature of man, and left out
of the nature of woman, had never troubled her gentle and affectionate
soul; and not until the sudden death of her husband did she begin even
remotely to fall in love with the man. But when he was once safely dead
she worshipped his memory with an ardour which would have seemed to her
indelicate had he been still alive. For sixteen years she had worn a
crape veil on her bonnet, and she still went occasionally, after the
morning service was over on Sunday, to place fresh flowers on his grave.
Now that his "earthly nature," against which she had struggled so
earnestly while he was living, was no longer in need of the pious
exorcisms with which she had treated its frequent manifestations, she