He would not get it till he woke
about eleven. With the instinct to take all the respite she could, and
knowing no more than before how she would receive his return, she went
out in the forenoon and wandered about all day shopping and trying not
to think. Returning at tea-time, she went straight up to her baby, and
there heard from Betty that he had come, and gone out with his violin to
the music-room.

Bent over the child, Gyp needed all her self-control--but her
self-control was becoming great. Soon, the girl would come fluttering
down that dark, narrow lane; perhaps at this very minute her fingers
were tapping at the door, and he was opening it to murmur, "No; she's
back!" Ah, then the girl would shrink! The rapid whispering--some other
meeting-place! Lips to lips, and that look on the girl's face; till she
hurried away from the shut door, in the darkness, disappointed! And
he, on that silver-and-gold divan, gnawing his moustache, his
eyes--catlike---staring at the fire! And then, perhaps, from his violin
would come one of those swaying bursts of sound, with tears in them, and
the wind in them, that had of old bewitched her! She said:

"Open the window just a little, Betty dear--it's hot."

There it was, rising, falling! Music! Why did it so move one even when,
as now, it was the voice of insult! And suddenly she thought: "He
will expect me to go out there again and play for him. But I will not,
never!"

She put her baby down, went into her bedroom, and changed hastily into a
teagown for the evening, ready to go downstairs. A little shepherdess
in china on the mantel-shelf attracted her attention, and she took it
in her hand. She had bought it three and more years ago, when she first
came to London, at the beginning of that time of girl-gaiety when all
life seemed a long cotillion, and she its leader. Its cool daintiness
made it seem the symbol of another world, a world without depths or
shadows, a world that did not feel--a happy world!

She had not long to wait before he tapped on the drawing-room window.
She got up from the tea-table to let him in. Why do faces gazing in
through glass from darkness always look hungry--searching, appealing for
what you have and they have not? And while she was undoing the latch
she thought: 'What am I going to say? I feel nothing!' The ardour of his
gaze, voice, hands seemed to her so false as to be almost comic; even
more comically false his look of disappointment when she s