But since her talk with Mrs. Fowler, who had shown her photographs of George as a baby, some in long clothes, some in his first short frock, with a woolly lamb in his hands, some in a velvet suit, with his lustrous curls falling over a lace collar, Gabriella had felt that she possessed a new understanding of her husband and of the imperative needs of his nature.  The child quality in him, the eternal boy that he betrayed sometimes by accident, appeared to her now to be the salient attribute of his character.  After all, because of this quality, which was at once his charm and his weakness, she could not judge him as harshly as she might judge another man, she could not demand of him the gravity and the restraint of his father, who had never been young.

“I ought not to have kept it from him.  His mother is right.  She understands him better than I do,” she thought, as she looked at the clock.  “If I had told him sooner he might be with me now.”

Through the muffled stillness of the house the sound of the opening front door stole up to her, and she heard George come in and stop for a minute to take off his hat and coat in the lower hail.  Then she heard his footsteps move to the staircase; and while she listened she had a curious intuitive sense that it was not George at all, but a stranger who was coming to her, and that this stranger walked like a very old man.  She heard him reach the bend in the stairs, and without stopping to put out the light, pass on to her door, which was the first on the landing.  As he reached the top of the stairs, he stumbled once; then she heard his hand on the knob and a fumbling sound as if the knob would not turn.  The door seemed to take an eternity to open, and while she sprang up with the clutch of terror at her heart, she felt again the sharp, agonizing premonition that a stranger was approaching her.

“George!” she called in a strangled voice, and waited, standing, for him to enter.

CHAPTER VII

MOTHERHOOD

At noon the next day Mrs. Fowler came into Gabriella’s room and found her sewing beside the window which looked on a gray expanse of sky and street, where a few snowflakes were falling.

“Did you tell him, dear?” she asked, arranging a handful of red roses in a little alabaster vase on the desk.

No, Gabriella had not told him.  She felt now that she should never be able to tell him, but all she said was: 

“I didn’t get a chance.  How lovely those roses are.”

Mrs. Fowler set the vase where the gray light fell on it, and then turning with empty hands from the desk, asked gently: 

“Aren’t you making a mistake, dear?” Her movements were like those of a character in a play who is made to fill in an awkward pause with some mechanical action.

“I couldn’t tell him last night,” replied Gabriella; “he was sick all night.”