my mother, Dad?"

"Only once--the very ride we've been to-day. She was on a black mare; I
had a chestnut--" Yes, in that grove on the little hill, which they had
ridden through that morning, he had dismounted and stood beside her.

Gyp stretched her hand across the table and laid it on his.

"Tell me about her, dear. Was she beautiful?"

"Yes."

"Dark? Tall?"

"Very like you, Gyp. A little--a little"--he did not know how to
describe that difference--"a little more foreign-looking perhaps. One of
her grandmothers was Italian, you know."

"How did you come to love her? Suddenly?"

"As suddenly as"--he drew his hand away and laid it on the veranda
rail--"as that sun came on my hand."

Gyp said quietly, as if to herself:

"Yes; I don't think I understand that--yet."

Winton drew breath through his teeth with a subdued hiss.

"Did she love you at first sight, too?"

He blew out a long puff of smoke.

"One easily believes what one wants to--but I think she did. She used to
say so."

"And how long?"

"Only a year."

Gyp said very softly:

"Poor darling Dad." And suddenly she added: "I can't bear to think I
killed her--I can't bear it!"

Winton got up in the discomfort of these sudden confidences; a
blackbird, startled by the movement, ceased his song. Gyp said in a hard
voice:

"No; I don't want to have any children."

"Without that, I shouldn't have had you, Gyp."

"No; but I don't want to have them. And I don't--I don't want to love
like that. I should be afraid."

Winton looked at her for a long time without speaking, his brows drawn
down, frowning, puzzled, as though over his own past.

"Love," he said, "it catches you, and you're gone. When it comes, you
welcome it, whether it's to kill you or not. Shall we start back, my
child?"

When she got home, it was not quite noon. She hurried over her bath and
dressing, and ran out to the music-room. Its walls had been hung with
Willesden scrim gilded over; the curtains were silver-grey; there was a
divan covered with silver-and-gold stuff, and a beaten brass fireplace.
It was a study in silver, and gold, save for two touches of fantasy--a
screen round the piano-head, covered with brilliantly painted peacocks'
tails, and a blue Persian vase, in which were flowers of various hues of
red.

Fiorsen was standing at the window in a fume of cigarette smoke. He did
not turn round. Gyp put her hand within his arm, and said:

"So sorry, dear. But it's