Then, after folding the paper, and removing her spectacles, she asked grimly: "Can you look me in the eyes, Gabriella, and tell me that you ain't still hankerin' after Arthur ?" The blush of a girl made the business-like Gabriella appear as young and as piquantly feminine as her daughter.
"No, Miss Polly, I cannot," she answered with incomparable directness; "I have loved Arthur all my life." "That's just what I thought all along, and yet you went off and married somebody else." Excited by the unexpected confession, Miss Polly was quivering with sympathy.
In that supreme instant of self-revelation Gabriella answered this accusation as if it had been uttered by her remorseful conscience.

"But that wasn't love," she said slowly; "it was my youth craving experience; it was my youth reaching after the unknown, the untried, the undiscovered.

We all go questing for adventure one way or another, I suppose, but it was not the reality." "I wonder what is," said Miss Polly in a whisper; "I wonder what is, Gabriella ?" "That," replied Gabriella softly, "is what I am still trying to discover.".