egard of women as
among the minor things of life--he had stood there by the door, in no
hurry to dance, taking a survey with an air that just did not give an
impression of "side" because it was not at all put on. And--behold!--SHE
had walked past him, and his world was changed for ever. Was it an
illusion of light that made her whole spirit seem to shine through a
half-startled glance? Or a little trick of gait, a swaying, seductive
balance of body; was it the way her hair waved back, or a subtle scent,
as of a flower? What was it? The wife of a squire of those parts, with
a house in London. Her name? It doesn't matter--she has been long enough
dead. There was no excuse--not an ill-treated woman; an ordinary,
humdrum marriage, of three years standing; no children. An amiable good
fellow of a husband, fifteen years older than herself, inclined already
to be an invalid. No excuse! Yet, in one month from that night, Winton
and she were lovers, not only in thought but in deed. A thing so utterly
beyond "good form" and his sense of what was honourable and becoming in
an officer and gentleman that it was simply never a question of weighing
pro and con, the cons had it so completely. And yet from that first
evening, he was hers, she his. For each of them the one thought was how
to be with the other. If so--why did they not at least go off together?
Not for want of his beseeching. And no doubt, if she had survived Gyp's
birth, they would have gone. But to face the prospect of ruining two
men, as it looked to her, had till then been too much for that
soft-hearted creature. Death stilled her struggle before it was decided.
There are women in whom utter devotion can still go hand in hand with a
doubting soul. Such are generally the most fascinating; for the power of
hard and prompt decision robs women of mystery, of the subtle atmosphere
of change and chance. Though she had but one part in four of foreign
blood, she was not at all English. But Winton was English to his
back-bone, English in his sense of form, and in that curious streak of
whole-hearted desperation that will break form to smithereens in one
department and leave it untouched in every other of its owner's life. To
have called Winton a "crank" would never have occurred to any one--his
hair was always perfectly parted; his boots glowed; he was hard and
reticent, accepting and observing every canon of well-bred existence.
Yet, in that, his one infatuatio