that girl, that silly, sugar-plum girl, brought to such a pass by--her
husband. These feelings sustained her through that voyage to Fulham. She
got down at the nearest corner, walked up a widish street of narrow
grey houses till she came to number eighty-eight. On that newly scrubbed
step, waiting for the door to open, she very nearly turned and fled.
What exactly had she come to do?

The door was opened by a servant in an untidy frock. Mutton! The smell
of mutton--there it was, just as the girl had said!

"Is Miss--Miss Daphne Wing at home?"

In that peculiar "I've given it up" voice of domestics in small
households, the servant answered:

"Yes; Miss Disey's in. D'you want to see 'er? What nyme?"

Gyp produced her card. The maid looked at it, at Gyp, and at two
brown-painted doors, as much as to say, "Where will you have it?" Then,
opening the first of them, she said:

"Tyke a seat, please; I'll fetch her."

Gyp went in. In the middle of what was clearly the dining-room, she
tried to subdue the tremor of her limbs and a sense of nausea. The table
against which her hand rested was covered with red baize, no doubt to
keep the stains of mutton from penetrating to the wood. On the mahogany
sideboard reposed a cruet-stand and a green dish of very red apples.
A bamboo-framed talc screen painted with white and yellow marguerites
stood before a fireplace filled with pampas-grass dyed red. The chairs
were of red morocco, the curtains a brownish-red, the walls green, and
on them hung a set of Landseer prints. The peculiar sensation which red
and green in juxtaposition produce on the sensitive was added to Gyp's
distress. And, suddenly, her eyes lighted on a little deep-blue china
bowl. It stood on a black stand on the mantel-piece, with nothing in it.
To Gyp, in this room of red and green, with the smell of mutton creeping
in, that bowl was like the crystallized whiff of another world. Daphne
Wing--not Daisy Wagge--had surely put it there! And, somehow, it touched
her--emblem of stifled beauty, emblem of all that the girl had tried to
pour out to her that August afternoon in her garden nearly a year ago.
Thin Eastern china, good and really beautiful! A wonder they allowed it
to pollute this room!

A sigh made her turn round. With her back against the door and a white,
scared face, the girl was standing. Gyp thought: 'She has suffered
horribly.' And, going impulsively up to her, she held out her hand.

Daphne Wing sig