the intense
wayward feeling of his playing was chiselled by that technique, as if a
flame were being frozen in its swaying. When he stopped, she did not
join in the tornado of applause, but sat motionless, looking up at him.
Quite unconstrained by all those people, he passed the back of his hand
across his hot brow, shoving up a wave or two of that queer-coloured
hair; then, with a rather disagreeable smile, he made a short supple bow
or two. And she thought, "What strange eyes he has--like a great cat's!"
Surely they were green; fierce, yet shy, almost furtive--mesmeric!
Certainly the strangest man she had ever seen, and the most frightening.
He seemed looking straight at her; and, dropping her gaze, she clapped.
When she looked again, his face had lost that smile for a kind of
wistfulness. He made another of those little supple bows straight at
her--it seemed to Gyp--and jerked his violin up to his shoulder. "He's
going to play to me," she thought absurdly. He played without
accompaniment a little tune that seemed to twitch the heart. When he
finished, this time she did not look up, but was conscious that he gave
one impatient bow and walked off.

That evening at dinner she said to Winton:

"I heard a violinist to-day, Dad, the most wonderful playing--Gustav
Fiorsen. Is that Swedish, do you think--or what?"

Winton answered:

"Very likely. What sort of a bounder was he to look at? I used to know
a Swede in the Turkish army--nice fellow, too."

"Tall and thin and white-faced, with bumpy cheek-bones, and hollows under
them, and queer green eyes. Oh, and little goldy side-whiskers."

"By Jove! It sounds the limit."

Gyp murmured, with a smile:

"Yes; I think perhaps he is."

She saw him next day in the gardens. They were sitting close to the
Schiller statue, Winton reading The Times, to whose advent he looked
forward more than he admitted, for he was loath by confessions of boredom
to disturb Gyp's manifest enjoyment of her stay. While perusing the
customary comforting animadversions on the conduct of those "rascally
Radicals" who had just come into power, and the account of a Newmarket
meeting, he kept stealing sidelong glances at his daughter.

Certainly she had never looked prettier, daintier, shown more breeding
than she did out here among these Germans with their thick pasterns, and
all the cosmopolitan hairy-heeled crowd in this God-forsaken place! The
girl, unconscious of his stealthy re