swered. The squire was likable, and
had been fond of HER; and though never once had it seemed possible to
Winton to have acted otherwise than he did, he had all the time preserved
a just and formal sense of the wrong he had done this man. He did not
experience remorse, but he had always an irksome feeling as of a debt
unpaid, mitigated by knowledge that no one had ever suspected, and
discounted by memory of the awful torture he had endured to make sure
against suspicion.

When, plus distinction and minus his hand, he was at last back in
England, the squire had come to see him. The poor man was failing fast
from Bright's disease. Winton entered again that house in Mount Street
with an emotion, to stifle which required more courage than any cavalry
charge. But one whose heart, as he would have put it, is "in the right
place" does not indulge the quaverings of his nerves, and he faced those
rooms where he had last seen her, faced that lonely little dinner with
her husband, without sign of feeling. He did not see little Ghita, or
Gyp, as she had nicknamed herself, for she was already in her bed; and it
was a whole month before he brought himself to go there at an hour when
he could see the child if he would. The fact is, he was afraid. What
would the sight of this little creature stir in him? When Betty, the
nurse, brought her in to see the soldier gentleman with "the leather
hand," who had sent her those funny toys, she stood calmly staring with
her large, deep-brown eyes. Being seven, her little brown-velvet frock
barely reached the knees of her thin, brown-stockinged legs planted one
just in front of the other, as might be the legs of a small brown bird;
the oval of her gravely wondering face was warm cream colour without red
in it, except that of the lips, which were neither full nor thin, and had
a little tuck, the tiniest possible dimple at one corner. Her hair of
warm dark brown had been specially brushed and tied with a narrow red
ribbon back from her forehead, which was broad and rather low, and this
added to her gravity. Her eyebrows were thin and dark and perfectly
arched; her little nose was perfectly straight, her little chin in
perfect balance between round and point. She stood and stared till
Winton smiled. Then the gravity of her face broke, her lips parted, her
eyes seemed to fly a little. And Winton's heart turned over within
him--she was the very child of her that he had lost! And he said,