"You always used to be, Gabrielle. I remember when you were the greatest tomboy in Hampstead. That, by the way, was before your engagement to Harry. Do you know, my dear girl, I wonder sometimes if marriage is your destiny at all."
"If not marriage, what then, father?"
"Public work. The practice of the ideas you have just been pleading to me."
Gabrielle shook her head. She spoke with little restraint, and in a way that astonished him altogether.
"I don't agree with you. I believe in my heart that I am destined to love and marriage. If it is not so, I may do something mad some day. Sometimes I long to get away from all this; but it must be with a man who can lead me. I shall never marry Harry—I wonder that I have not told him so before. Perhaps I should have done so had it not been for these awful weeks. Do you know, father, that I find life in opposition to every convention you have taught me since I was a child? There are no fairy godmothers in the world. Our guardian angels might be gamblers who throw us headlong into the stream and make wagers about our condition when we come out. We have to decide the most momentous questions when we are still babies and understand nothing about them. In the end it comes just to what Mr. Faber says, our brains make or mar us; and neither you nor I have any brains to speak of. Let us leave it there, father. I am growing really anxious about the child, and must know the truth. If she is not with the Bensons, I don't know where she is."
He assented, moved to some real anxiety by her obvious alarm. They wrote a note and dispatched it to the house of their friends the Bensons, who had shown much kindness to Maryska, but the afternoon had merged into evening before any answer was brought to them.
CHAPTER III
THE MARIGOLDS TO THE SUN