s lips fell apart. Gyp walked across the
room and put her hand on the bell. She had lost her fear. Without a
word, he turned, and went out into the garden. She watched him cross
the lawn. Gone! She had beaten him by the one thing not even violent
passions can withstand--ridicule, almost unconscious ridicule. Then she
gave way and pulled the bell with nervous violence. The sight of the
maid, in her trim black dress and spotless white apron, coming from the
house completed her restoration. Was it possible that she had really
been frightened, nearly failing in that encounter, nearly dominated by
that man--in her own house, with her own maids down there at hand? And
she said quietly:

"I want the puppies, please."

"Yes, ma'am."

Over the garden, the day brooded in the first-gathered warmth of summer.
Mid-June of a fine year. The air was drowsy with hum and scent.

And Gyp, sitting in the shade, while the puppies rolled and snapped,
searched her little world for comfort and some sense of safety, and
could not find it; as if there were all round her a hot heavy fog in
which things lurked, and where she kept erect only by pride and the will
not to cry out that she was struggling and afraid.

Fiorsen, leaving his house that morning, had walked till he saw a
taxi-cab. Leaning back therein, with hat thrown off, he caused himself
to be driven rapidly, at random. This was one of his habits when his
mind was not at ease--an expensive idiosyncrasy, ill-afforded by a
pocket that had holes. The swift motion and titillation by the perpetual
close shaving of other vehicles were sedative to him. He needed
sedatives this morning. To wake in his own bed without the least
remembering how he had got there was no more new to him than to many
another man of twenty-eight, but it was new since his marriage. If he
had remembered even less he would have been more at ease. But he could
just recollect standing in the dark drawing-room, seeing and touching a
ghostly Gyp quite close to him. And, somehow, he was afraid. And when he
was afraid--like most people--he was at his worst.

If she had been like all the other women in whose company he had eaten
passion-fruit, he would not have felt this carking humiliation. If she
had been like them, at the pace he had been going since he obtained
possession of her, he would already have "finished," as Rosek had said.
And he knew well enough that he had not "finished." He might get drunk,
might be loos