ccurred to her almost resentfully
that love was not always an unmixed delight.

"Is there any one else, Gabriella?" he asked with a sudden choking sound
in his voice. "I have sometimes thought--in the last four or five
months--that there might be--that you had changed--that--" He stopped
abruptly, and she answered him with a beautiful frankness which would
have horrified the imperishable, if desiccated, coquetry of her mother.

"There is some one else and there isn't," she replied simply. "I mean I
think of some one else very often--of some one who isn't in my life at
all--from whom I never hear--"

"Is it George Fowler?"

She bowed her head, and, though she did not blush, her eyes grew
radiant.

"And you have known him less than a year?"

Again she bowed her head without speaking. What was there, after all,
that she could say in justification of her behaviour?

A groan escaped him, smothered into a gentle murmur of protest. "And I
thought women were more constant than men!" he exclaimed with something
of the baffled and helpless feeling which had overtaken Uncle
Meriweather while he regarded Gabriella.

The generalization was not without interest for Gabriella.

"I thought so, too," she observed dispassionately. "I thought so, too,
and that is why it was such a dreadful surprise to me when it happened.
You yourself aren't more shocked and surprised than I was in the
beginning," she added.

"But you've got used to the thought, I suppose?"

"Well, one has to, you see. What else is there to do? I always
understood from mother"--she went on with the same eager interest, as if
she were stumbling upon new and important intellectual discoveries--"I
always understood that women never fell in love with men first--I mean
until they had had positive proof that their love would be returned. But
in this case that didn't seem to matter at all. Nothing mattered, and
the more I fought against it and tried to be true to my engagement, the
more I found myself being false. It's all very

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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