y to find out all that she wanted to know; and
even if he never told her anything more--well, she was quite accustomed
to the masculine habit of never telling women anything more. Her mother
and Jane were as ignorant of finance as they had been in their cradles;
Cousin Pussy spoke of the "tobacco business" as if it were a sacred
mystery superior to the delicate feminine faculties; and while Gabriella
was engaged to Arthur, he had fallen into the habit of gently reminding
her that she "knew nothing of law."

"Very well, dearest, I shan't bother you," she said cheerfully, "only,
of course, I couldn't possibly leave mother with Jane and Charley. She
doesn't realize it, but she would be perfectly miserable."

"She told me that leaving Richmond was like death to her."

"That's only because she knows she's going," answered Gabriella, but her
endeavour to explain her mother's habit of mind appeared to her to be so
hopeless that she added unconvincingly: "You can't imagine how dependent
she is on me. Jane doesn't know how to manage her at all, though they
are so much alike."

"Well, of course, if we live at home--"

"But you promised me we'd be to ourselves, George; you can't have
forgotten it. We talked it over, every bit of it, and I told you in the
beginning I couldn't leave mother."

"If you loved me enough to marry me, I should think you'd be willing to
give up your family for me." He spoke doggedly; it was his way to speak
doggedly when he was driving a point.

"It isn't that, dear, you know it isn't that."

Taking a letter from his pocket, he drew a sheet of blue note paper,
closely interlined, from the envelope, and handed it to her.

"You can see for yourself how it is," he said in an aggrieved voice. By
his tone he had managed to put her in the wrong as utterly as if she,
not he, were trying to break her word. Yet she had told him in the very
beginning that she could not leave her mother; she had refused to engage
herself to him until he had offered Mrs. Carr a home with

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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