e a hot
bath and a cup of hot tea at once?"

Gyp nodded. Anything--anything! And when the maid was gone, she thought
mechanically: 'A cup of hot tea! How quaint! What should it be but hot?'

The maid came back with the tea; she was an affectionate girl, full of
that admiring love servants and dogs always felt for Gyp, imbued, too,
with the instinctive partisanship which stores itself one way or the
other in the hearts of those who live in houses where the atmosphere
lacks unity. To her mind, the mistress was much too good for him--a
foreigner--and such 'abits! Manners--he hadn't any! And no good would
come of it. Not if you took her opinion!

"And I've turned the water in, m'm. Will you have a little mustard in
it?"

Again Gyp nodded. And the girl, going downstairs for the mustard, told
cook there was "that about the mistress that makes you quite pathetic."
The cook, who was fingering her concertina, for which she had a passion,
answered:

"She 'ides up her feelin's, same as they all does. Thank 'eaven she
haven't got that drawl, though, that 'er old aunt 'as--always makes me
feel to want to say, 'Buck up, old dear, you ain't 'alf so precious as
all that!'"

And when the maid Ellen had taken the mustard and gone, she drew out her
concertina to its full length and, with cautionary softness, began to
practise "Home, Sweet Home!"

To Gyp, lying in her hot bath, those muffled strains just mounted, not
quite as a tune, rather as some far-away humming of large flies. The
heat of the water, the pungent smell of the mustard, and that droning
hum slowly soothed and drowsed away the vehemence of feeling. She
looked at her body, silver-white in the yellowish water, with a dreamy
sensation. Some day she, too, would love! Strange feeling she had never
had before! Strange, indeed, that it should come at such a moment,
breaking through the old instinctive shrinking. Yes; some day love would
come to her. There floated before her brain the adoring look on Daphne
Wing's face, the shiver that had passed along her arm, and pitifulness
crept into her heart--a half-bitter, half-admiring pitifulness. Why
should she grudge--she who did not love? The sounds, like the humming
of large flies, grew deeper, more vibrating. It was the cook, in her
passion swelling out her music on the phrase,

"Be it ne-e-ver so humble,
There's no-o place like home!"

XIII

That night, Gyp slept peacefully, as though nothing had happ