in gazing. She
gave a little smothered sob and held out her hand.

II

Gyp was too proud to give by halves. And in those early days she gave
Fiorsen everything except--her heart. She earnestly desired to give that
too; but hearts only give themselves. Perhaps if the wild man in him,
maddened by beauty in its power, had not so ousted the spirit man, her
heart might have gone with her lips and the rest of her. He knew he was
not getting her heart, and it made him, in the wildness of his nature
and the perversity of a man, go just the wrong way to work, trying to
conquer her by the senses, not the soul.

Yet she was not unhappy--it cannot be said she was unhappy, except for a
sort of lost feeling sometimes, as if she were trying to grasp something
that kept slipping, slipping away. She was glad to give him pleasure.
She felt no repulsion--this was man's nature. Only there was always
that feeling that she was not close. When he was playing, with the
spirit-look on his face, she would feel: 'Now, now, surely I shall get
close to him!' But the look would go; how to keep it there she did not
know, and when it went, her feeling went too.

Their little suite of rooms was at the very end of the hotel, so that he
might play as much as he wished. While he practised in the mornings she
would go into the garden, which sloped in rock-terraces down to the
sea. Wrapped in fur, she would sit there with a book. She soon knew each
evergreen, or flower that was coming out--aubretia, and laurustinus, a
little white flower whose name was uncertain, and one star-periwinkle.
The air was often soft; the birds sang already and were busy with their
weddings, and twice, at least, spring came in her heart--that wonderful
feeling when first the whole being scents new life preparing in the
earth and the wind--the feeling that only comes when spring is not yet,
and one aches and rejoices all at once. Seagulls often came over her,
craning down their greedy bills and uttering cries like a kitten's
mewing.

Out here she had feelings, that she did not get with him, of being at
one with everything. She did not realize how tremendously she had grown
up in these few days, how the ground bass had already come into the
light music of her life. Living with Fiorsen was opening her eyes to
much beside mere knowledge of "man's nature"; with her perhaps
fatal receptivity, she was already soaking up the atmosphere of his
philosophy. He was always in revolt