a bit alike,
but it all happened on the spur of the moment, didn't it?"

"It always seems that way when one looks back, doesn't it?" asked
Gabriella. "But what I can't understand"--she brought it out with a
frown--"is why marriage doesn't change one. I used to think I'd be
different, but I'm not. And even love seems to leave people wanting
everything else just as badly. Your mother has had a perfect love--she
told me so--and yet it hasn't kept her from wanting all the other things
in life, has it? I wish I could work it out," she finished, a little
sadly, for she was thinking of her mother's cry on the night of Jane's
attack: "I am tempted to hope Gabriella will never marry. The Carrs all
marry so badly!" Why had those words come back to her to-night? She had
not remembered them for months, she had even forgotten that she had
heard them, and now they floated to her as clearly as if they had been
spoken aloud.

In a little while Billy came in, and when, after a few moments of
spasmodic affability, Mrs. Crowborough rose and pleaded an early board
meeting on the morrow, Gabriella watched Patty wrap her honey-coloured
head in a white scarf and then stand, waiting for a cab, in the doorway.
Happiness, with so many people an invisible attribute, encircled Patty
like a garment of light. It crowned her white brow under the glory of
her hair; it shone in her eyes; it rippled in her smile; it lingered in
a beam of sunshine on her lips. With her arm in Billy's she looked back
laughing from the steps, and it seemed to Gabriella that all the
brightness of life was going with them into the darkness. Beside the
curbstone an old cab horse, dazzled by the light from the door, turned
his head slowly toward them; and the look in his eyes, wistful,
questioning, expectant, seemed to say, "This is not life, but a
miracle." And from his box the red-cheeked, wheezy Irish driver gazed
down on Patty with the same wistfulness, the same questioning, the same
expectancy.

"I never see Patty go off in a cab

Martha Finley (1828 - 1909) was a teacher and author of numerous works, the most well known being the 28 volume Elsie Dinsmore series which was published over a span of 38 years. The daughter of Presbyterian minister Dr. James Brown Finley and his wife and cousin Maria Theresa Brown Finley, she was born on April 26th, 1828 in Chillicothe, Ohio. Finley wrote many of her books under the psodonym Martha Farquharson. She died in 1909 in Elkton, Maryland, where she moved in 1876.

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