temper. "He is really dreadfully penitent, and he sees that he hasn't
always treated me as he ought to have done. But you'll know what I mean
when you marry, Gabriella. She'll understand me then, won't she,
mother?"

"I'm sometimes tempted to hope that Gabriella will never marry," replied
Mrs. Carr with the uncompromising bitterness of abject despair; "the
Carrs all seem to marry so badly."

In her normal mood she would never have uttered this heresy, for she
belonged to a generation that regarded even a bad marriage as better for
a woman than no marriage at all; but the night had worn her out, and one
of her spells of neuralgia, which followed fatigue, was already
beginning in her face. The purple crocheted "fascinator" she had caught
up at the doctor's entrance was still on her head, and her long pale
face, beneath the airy scallops, appeared frozen in an expression of
incurable melancholy. For the rest she had been too frightened, too
forgetful of herself and her own comfort even to put on her stockings,
though Gabriella had begged her to do so. "Don't think about me. Attend
to poor Jane," she had repeated over and over.

"Mother, go into my room and get into bed," commanded Gabriella, whose
patience, never abundant, was ebbing low. "If you don't get some sleep
your neuralgia won't be any better."

"It isn't any better. I don't expect it to be any better."

"Well, you must go to bed or it will get worse. I'll heat you a cup of
milk and wrap you up in warm blankets."

"Don't worry about me, dear. Think of poor Jane."

"We've been thinking of Jane all night, and you need it now more than
she does. I can tell by your eyes how you are suffering."

In the first streak of dawn, which was beginning to glimmer faintly on
the window-panes, Mrs. Carr looked as if she had withered overnight.

"It's only my left temple," she said dully, "otherwise I am quite well.
No, dear, I must rub Jane's forehead until she falls asleep. The doctor
said it was important that we should keep her so

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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