return through the lamp-lit town to the big iron entrance-gate, the
parklike lawn; the brilliant supper in the great house, the
noiseless movements, the perfect manners of the many servants;
later in the evening the music, the dancing, the wild joy--
fairyland once more. But how far, far away now! And how the forces
of life had tossed things since then like straws on the eddies of a
tempest: her grandmother killed, thousands of miles away, with
sorrow; her uncles with their oldest sons, mere boys, fighting and
falling together; tears, poverty, ruin everywhere: and she, after
years of struggle, cast completely out of the only world she had
ever known into another that she had never imagined.

Gabriella felt this evening what often came to her at times: a deep
yearning for her own people of the past, for their voices, their
ways of looking at life; for the gentleness and courtesy, and the
thousand unconscious moods and acts that rendered them
distinguished and delightful. She would have liked to slip back
into the old elegance, to have been surrounded by the old rich and
beautiful things. The child-princess who was once her sole self was
destined to live within Gabriella always.

But she knew that the society in which she had moved was lost to
her finally. Not alone through the vicissitudes of the war; for
after the war, despite the overthrow, the almost complete
disappearance, of many families, it had come together, it had
reconstituted itself, it flourished still. It was lost to her
because she had become penniless and because she had gone to work.
When it transpired that she had declined all aid, thrown off all
disguises, and taken her future into her own hands, to work and to
receive wages for her work, in the social world where she was known