upation. She shut her lips with
soft but obstinate determination, and Gabriella, watching her closely,
told herself that "wild horses couldn't drag another word out of her
mother to-night." The girl longed to talk it over; but she might have
tried as successfully to gossip with the angel on a marble tombstone.
She wanted to hear what George had said, to ask how he was looking, and
to wonder aloud why he had come back. She wanted to throw herself into
her mother's arms and listen to all the little important things that
filled the world for her. If only the aloof virtue in Mrs. Carr's face
would relax into a human expression!

Taking off her hat, Gabriella went into the bedroom, and then, coming
back again after a short absence, remarked with forced gaiety: "I
suppose he didn't have anything interesting to tell you, did he?"

"No." Though the light had almost waned, Mrs. Carr broke off a fresh
piece of thread and leaned nearer the window, while she tried to find
the eye of the needle.

"Let me thread your needle, mother. It is too late to work, anyway. You
will ruin your eyesight."

"I have never considered my eyesight, Gabriella."

"I know you haven't, and that's why you ought to begin."

As it was really growing too dark to see, Mrs. Carr rolled the thread
back on the spool, stuck the needle into the last buttonhole, and
folding the infant's dress on which she was working, laid it away in her
straw work-basket.

"Will you light the gas, Gabriella?"

"Don't work any more to-night, mother. It is almost supper time."

Without replying, Mrs. Carr moved with her basket to a chair under the
chandelier. Once seated there, she unfolded the dress, took the needle
from the unfinished buttonhole, and tried again unsuccessfully to run
the thread through the eye. Then, while Gabriella rushed to her aid, she
removed her glasses and patiently polished them on a bit of chamois skin
she kept in her basket.

"Don't you feel as if you could eat a chop to-night, mother?"

"I haven't been a

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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