gaze from his, and suddenly his crisp
hair caught her eyes. Surely--surely it was curled with tongs! A kind
of spasm of amusement was set free in her heart, and, almost inaudibly,
the words escaped her lips: "Une technique merveilleuse!" His eyes
wavered; he uttered a little gasp; his lips fell apart. Gyp walked
across the room and put her hand on the bell. She had lost her fear.
Without a word, he turned, and went out into the garden. She watched him
cross the lawn. Gone! She had beaten him by the one thing not even
violent passions can withstand--ridicule, almost unconscious ridicule.
Then she gave way and pulled the bell with nervous violence. The sight
of the maid, in her trim black dress and spotless white apron, coming
from the house completed her restoration. Was it possible that she had
really been frightened, nearly failing in that encounter, nearly
dominated by that man--in her own house, with her own maids down there at
hand? And she said quietly:

"I want the puppies, please."

"Yes, ma'am."

Over the garden, the day brooded in the first-gathered warmth of summer.
Mid-June of a fine year. The air was drowsy with hum and scent.

And Gyp, sitting in the shade, while the puppies rolled and snapped,
searched her little world for comfort and some sense of safety, and could
not find it; as if there were all round her a hot heavy fog in which
things lurked, and where she kept erect only by pride and the will not to
cry out that she was struggling and afraid.

Fiorsen, leaving his house that morning, had walked till he saw a
taxi-cab. Leaning back therein, with hat thrown off, he caused himself
to be driven rapidly, at random. This was one of his habits when his
mind was not at ease--an expensive idiosyncrasy, ill-afforded by a pocket
that had holes. The swift motion and titillation by the perpetual close
shaving of other vehicles were sedative to him. He needed sedatives this
morning. To wake in his own bed without the least remembering how he had
got there was no more new to him than to many another man of
twenty-eight, but it was new since his marriage. If he had remembered
even less he would have been more at ease. But he could just recollect
standing in the dark drawing-room, seeing and touching a ghostly Gyp
quite close to him. And, somehow, he was afraid. And when he was
afraid--like most people--he was at his worst.

If she had been like all the other women in whose company he had