What could she have added to the answer she had given him?
When they reached the house, he did not come in with her, and tears stained her face while she went slowly up the steps, and stood beside Jane's hydrangeas with her hand on the bell.

Then, as the door opened quickly, she saw her mother waiting, with an eager, expectant look, at the door of the library, and heard her excited voice murmur: "Well, dear ?" "We had a lovely drive, mother.

Arthur is just as I remembered him, except that he has grown so much older." A disappointed expression crossed Mrs.Carr's face.

"Is that all ?" she asked regretfully.
Gabriella laughed happily.

"That is all--only I found out exactly what I wanted to know." For the rest of the week she devoted herself to her mother with a solicitude which aroused in the brain of that melancholy lady serious apprehensions of a hastening decline; and when her visit was over, she packed her trunks, with girlish, delicious thrills of happiness, and started back to New York.
"Do you really think I am failing so rapidly, Gabriella ?" Mrs.Carr inquired anxiously while they waited for the train on the platform of the upper station.
"Failing?
Why, no, mother.