r and put his face
to it. The bristles of his moustache tickled her palm; his nose flattened
itself against her fingers, and his lips kept murmuring words into the
hand, with the moist warm touch of his lips. Gyp knew he was burying
there all his remorse, perhaps the excesses he had committed while she
had been away from him, burying the fears he had felt, and the emotion at
seeing her so white and still. She felt that in a minute he would raise
a quite different face. And it flashed through her: "If I loved him I
wouldn't mind what he did--ever! Why don't I love him? There's
something loveable. Why don't I?"

He did raise his face; his eyes lighted on the baby, and he grinned.

"Look at this!" he said. "Is it possible? Oh, my Gyp, what a funny one!
Oh, oh, oh!" He went off into an ecstasy of smothered laughter; then his
face grew grave, and slowly puckered into a sort of comic disgust. Gyp
too had seen the humours of her baby, of its queer little reddish pudge
of a face, of its twenty-seven black hairs, and the dribble at its almost
invisible mouth; but she had also seen it as a miracle; she had felt it,
and there surged up from her all the old revolt and more against his lack
of consideration. It was not a funny one--her baby! It was not ugly!
Or, if it were, she was not fit to be told of it. Her arm tightened
round the warm bundled thing against her. Fiorsen put his finger out and
touched its cheek.

"It IS real--so it is. Mademoiselle Fiorsen. Tk, tk!"

The baby stirred. And Gyp thought: 'If I loved I wouldn't even mind his
laughing at my baby. It would be different.'

"Don't wake her!" she whispered. She felt his eyes on her, knew that his
interest in the baby had ceased as suddenly as it came, that he was
thinking, "How long before I have you in my arms again?" He touched her
hair. And, suddenly, she had a fainting, sinking sensation that she had
never yet known. When she opened her eyes again, the economic agent was
holding something beneath her nose and making sounds that seemed to be
the words: "Well, I am a d--d fool!" repeatedly expressed. Fiorsen was
gone.

Seeing Gyp's eyes once more open, the nurse withdrew the ammonia,
replaced the baby, and saying: "Now go to sleep!" withdrew behind the
screen. Like all robust personalities, she visited on others her
vexations with herself. But Gyp did not go to sleep; she gazed now at
her sleeping baby, now at the pattern of the wall-paper