bute 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
remembered only the dark beauty of his face, his robust and vigorous
youth, the tenderness and gallantry of his passion. For her daughters
she had drawn an imaginary portrait of him which combined the pagan
beauty of Antinous with the militant purity of Saint Paul; and this
romantic blending of the heathen and the Presbyterian virtues had passed
through her young imagination into the awakening soul of Gabriella.

By the town at large Mrs. Carr's sorrow was alluded to as "a beautiful
grief," yet so deeply rooted in her being was the instinct to twine,
that for the first few years of her bereavement she had simply sat in
her widow's weeds, with her rent paid by Cousin Jimmy Wrenn and her
market bills settled monthly by Uncle Beverly Blair, and waited
patiently for some man to come and support her.

When no man came, and Uncle Beverly died of a stroke of apoplexy with
his will unsigned, she had turned, with the wasted energy of the unfit
and the incompetent, to solve the inexplicable problem of indigent
ladyhood. And it was at this crucial instant that Becky Bollingbroke had
put her awful question: "Have you made up your mind, Fanny, what you are
going to do?" That was twelve years ago, but deep down in some secret
cave of Fanny's being the ghastly echo of the words still reverberated
through the emptiness and the silence.

"Don't you think, darling," she pleaded now, as she had pleaded to Becky
on that other dreadful occasion, "that we had better send immediately
for Cousin Jimmy Wrenn?"

"I--I can't think," gasped Jane, "but you may if you want to, mother."

"Send, Gabriella," said Mrs. Carr quickly, and she added tenderly, while
Gabriella d