"My dear daughter! my dear Gabriella!" exclaimed the lady in a charming voice; and looking down after the first kiss, Gabriella saw a handsome, slightly florid face, with the vivacious smile of a girl and a beautiful forehead under a stiffly crimped arch of gray hair which looked as hard and bright as silver. "I've been up since seven o'clock waiting for you. You must be famished. Come straight in to breakfast. Your father is already at the table, George. Poor man, he has to start downtown so dreadfully early." Bright, effusive, vivacious, and as emphatically Southern as if she had never left Franklin Street, Mrs. Fowler took off Gabriella's hat and coat, kissed her several times while she was doing so, and at last, still talking animatedly, led them into the dining-room. "Archibald, here they are," she said in a tone of unaffected delight, while a thin, serious-looking man, with anxious eyes, pale, aristocratic features, and skin that had a curious parchment-like texture, put down the _Times_, and came forward to meet them. Though he did not speak as he kissed her, Gabriella felt that there was sincere, if detached, friendliness in his little pat on her shoulder. He led her almost tenderly to her chair; and as soon as she was comfortably seated and supplied with rolls and bacon, resigned her contentedly to his wife and the butler. His manner of gentle abstraction, which Gabriella attributed first to something he had just read in the newspaper, she presently discovered to be his habitual attitude toward all the world except Wall Street. He ate his breakfast as if his attention were somewhere else; he spoke to his son and his daughter-in-law kindly, but as if he were not thinking about them; he treated his wife, whom he adored, as if he had not clearly perceived her. In the profound abstraction in which he lived every impression appeared to have become blurred except the tremendous impression of whirling forces; every detail seemed to have been obscured except the gigantic details of "Business." His manner was perfectly well-bred, but it was the manner of a man who moves through life rehearsing a part of which he barely remembers the words. From the first minute it was evident to Gabriella that her father-in-law adored his wife as an ideal, though he seemed scarcely aware of her as a person. He had given her his love, but his interests, his energies, his attention were elsewhere. "Is that the way George will treat me--as if I were only a dream woman?" thought Gabriella while she watched her father-in-law over the open sheet of the _Times_. Then, with her eyes on her husband, she realized that he was of his mother's blood, not his father's. Business could never absorb him. His restlessness, his instability, his love of pleasure, would prevent the sapping of his nature by one supreme interest.