"If a man were fool enough to base his unhappiness on his wife's goodness--why, yes. Don't you see that I may admire all this, and yet differ altogether? Isn't it one of the reasons why I ask you to be my wife, that I know how much reality and honest faith lies behind all you do? You haven't considered that--you'll have to before it's done with. I've a habit of getting my way; you'll discover it before I am through!" The taunt turned her patience to defiance. "No," she said, standing up as if impatient of it all, "I shall discover nothing, Mr. Faber. I intend to marry Harry Lassett in February!" "Ah! then I'll have to begin upon that temple at once. Have you thought about the plans of it?" She shrugged her shoulders. "Do not spoil my dreams--there is the bell. I think it must be Harry, for my father has a key." She went toward the door, he watching every step she took. Was it the face of a woman going to meet her lover, the face of an ecstasy, or of a painter's dream? The prosaic man deemed it to be neither. And yet he believed that she would marry the boy. II Gabrielle believed that also, but it was a vague thought, floating amid a medley of reproaches and vain longings. She had gone to her bedroom at eleven o'clock, when the night-nurse came on duty, and the quiet house was hushed to sleep; and there she sat before a great fire listening to the footsteps of the skaters who passed by, or the chime of bells upon the still air. What momentous thing was this which had happened to her to-day--what flood of fortune which had swept by and left her to a woman's reckoning? Was it not the thing which she had conceived in dreams most sweet--the hope which her father had not been ashamed to utter, the golden shore to which her eyes had been turned in hours of vain imagining? In a twinkling the gates of great promise had been opened for her, and she had refused to enter in. A word, and all the power and place of money would have been at her command. She had been silent--the coach of opportunity had rolled by and left her alone. She would have been less than a woman if some blunt truths had not emerged from this labyrinth of changing ideas. It is true that Faber had offered to make her Maryska's guardian, an obligation she was to share with her father to their mutual benefit. No money was to have been spared. They were to take a great house in London, and furnish it regardless of cost. The gates of that narrow social enclosure which money can open were no longer to be barred to them. Luxury of every kind was to be at their command--but all as recipients of a comparative stranger's benevolence, and as the servant of his whims. It would be different as his wife, for these things would have come to her then as a right.