have seen the
dance properly, wouldn't it? What will he think?"

Gyp smiled, and opened the door into the lane. When she returned,
Fiorsen was at the window, gazing out. Was it for her or for that flying
nymph?

IX

September and October passed. There were more concerts, not very well
attended. Fiorsen's novelty had worn off, nor had his playing sweetness
and sentiment enough for the big Public. There was also a financial
crisis. It did not seem to Gyp to matter. Everything seemed remote and
unreal in the shadow of her coming time. Unlike most mothers to be, she
made no garments, no preparations of any kind. Why make what might never
be needed? She played for Fiorsen a great deal, for herself not at all,
read many books--poetry, novels, biographies--taking them in at the
moment, and forgetting them at once, as one does with books read just to
distract the mind. Winton and Aunt Rosamund, by tacit agreement, came on
alternate afternoons. And Winton, almost as much under that shadow as
Gyp herself, would take the evening train after leaving her, and spend
the next day racing or cub-hunting, returning the morning of the day
after to pay his next visit. He had no dread just then like that of an
unoccupied day face to face with anxiety.

Betty, who had been present at Gyp's birth, was in a queer state. The
obvious desirability of such events to one of motherly type defrauded by
fate of children was terribly impinged on by that old memory, and a
solicitude for her "pretty" far exceeding what she would have had for a
daughter of her own. What a peony regards as a natural happening to a
peony, she watches with awe when it happens to the lily. That other
single lady of a certain age, Aunt Rosamund, the very antithesis to
Betty--a long, thin nose and a mere button, a sense of divine rights and
no sense of rights at all, a drawl and a comforting wheeze, length and
circumference, decision and the curtsey to providence, humour and none,
dyspepsia, and the digestion of an ostrich, with other oppositions--Aunt
Rosamund was also uneasy, as only one could be who disapproved heartily
of uneasiness, and habitually joked and drawled it into retirement.

But of all those round Gyp, Fiorsen gave the most interesting display.
He had not even an elementary notion of disguising his state of mind.
And his state of mind was weirdly, wistfully primitive. He wanted Gyp as
she had been. The thought that she might never b