“You don’t have to know a thing to think about it, sister Amelia,” replied the invalid timidly as she put on her flannel wrapper and fastened it with a safety pin at the throat.

“Well, I reckon it’s all right for a girl like Gabriella,” said Miss Amelia crushingly, “but when you look back on it from my age, you’ll know it isn’t worth a row of pins in a life.”

And beside the window downstairs Gabriella was thinking passionately:  “Shall I ever grow old?  Is it possible that I shall ever grow old like that?”

With the bare question, terror seized her—­the terror of growing old without George, the terror of dying before she had known the full beauty of life.  Looking ahead of her at the years empty of love, she saw them like a gray road, leaf strewn, wind swept, deserted, and herself creeping through them, as bent, as wrinkled, as disillusioned, as Miss Amelia.  The very image of a life without love was intolerable to her since she had known George—­for love meant George, and only George, in her thoughts.  That she could ever be happy again, ever take a natural pleasure in life if she lost him, was unimaginable to her at the instant.  She loved him, she had loved him from the first moment she saw him, she would never, though she lived a million years, love any one else.  It was as absurd to think that she could love again as that a flower could bloom afresh when its petals were withered.  No, without George there was only loveless old age—­there was only the future of Miss Amelia before her.  And she clung to this idea with a horror which Miss Amelia, who seldom reflected that she was loveless and by no means considered herself an object of pity, would have despised.

“I have no right to marry George, and yet if I don’t marry him I shall be miserable all my life,” she told herself with a sensation of panic.  It would be so long, the rest of her life, and without George it was as desolate as the gray road of her vision.  All the beauties of the universe, all the miracles of hope, of youth, of spring; her health, her intellect, her capacity for work and for taking pleasure in little things—­all these were as nothing to her if she lost George out of her life.  “I oughtn’t to marry him,” she repeated, “but if I don’t marry him I shall be miserable every minute until I die.”

Then a terror more awful than any she had yet suffered clutched at her heart.  Suppose he should never come back!  Suppose he had really meant to leave her for good!  Suppose he had ceased to love her since he went out of the house!  The possibility was so agonizing that she rose blindly from her chair and turned from the window as if the quiet street, filled with the dreamy sunshine of October, had offered an appalling, an unbelievable sight to her eyes.  If he had ceased to love her, she was helpless; and this sense of helplessness awoke a feeling of rage in her heart.  If he did not come back, she could never go after him.  She could only sit and wait until she grew as old and as ugly as Miss Amelia.  While the minutes, which seemed hours, dragged away, she wept the bitterest tears of her life—­tears not of wounded love, but of anger because she could do nothing but wait.