to the elegancies of _Belinda_ and to the
Irish atmosphere of _Ormond_. From these she plunged backwards into
the romantic mysteries of Mrs. Radcliffe, living, for a time, in
surroundings that might well have been imitated from the wintry
Roscarna. She read indiscriminately, and, in her eagerness of
imagination, became the heroine of fiction incarnate and the beloved of
every dashing young gentleman in print that she encountered.

Jocelyn was inclined to laugh at her, but Biddy, who considered that
all books except the breviary, which she possessed but could not read,
were inventions of the devil, disapproved. "Sure and you'll be after
rotting your poor brain with all that rubbidge," she said, rising to a
more vehement protest when, in the middle of the night, she discovered
Gabrielle fallen asleep with an open copy of _Don Juan_ beside her
pillow and a spent candle flaring within an inch of the lace
bed-curtains. Gabrielle smiled when Biddy woke her with a stream of
fluent abuse, for she had been dreaming that she herself was Haidee and
her Aegean island lay somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.

She lost a little of her gaiety, and irritated the serious Considine by
her dreaminess at the time when she was supposed to be acquiring useful
knowledge. He complained to Jocelyn, and Jocelyn, who hated being
worried about his daughter, was at last induced, after consultation
with Biddy Joyce, to send into Galway for the doctor. It pleased him
to have the laugh of Considine when the doctor pronounced her sound in
wind and limb--as well he might, for both were of the best.

Gabrielle couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. She was
happy in her new world--just as happy as she had been in the old
one--with the difference that she was possibly now more sensitive to
the beauty that surrounded her. In the time of her childhood she had
lived purely for the moment; sufficient unto each day had been its
particular physical joys; now she knew that the future held more for
her, that the life which she had taken for granted would not go on for
ever. Strange things must happen, possibly things more strange than
the adventures that she had found among books. She was now seventeen.
In her heart she felt an intuition that something must happen soon.
She waited for it to come with a kind of hushed excitement.

At the beginning of May she received a letter from Radway in which he
told her that the _Pennant_ was leaving the Wes