hat droning hum
slowly soothed and drowsed away the vehemence of feeling. She looked at
her body, silver-white in the yellowish water, with a dreamy sensation.
Some day she, too, would love! Strange feeling she had never had before!
Strange, indeed, that it should come at such a moment, breaking through
the old instinctive shrinking. Yes; some day love would come to her.
There floated before her brain the adoring look on Daphne Wing's face,
the shiver that had passed along her arm, and pitifulness crept into her
heart--a half-bitter, half-admiring pitifulness. Why should she
grudge--she who did not love? The sounds, like the humming of large
flies, grew deeper, more vibrating. It was the cook, in her passion
swelling out her music on the phrase,

"Be it ne-e-ver so humble,
There's no-o place like home!"

XIII

That night, Gyp slept peacefully, as though nothing had happened, as
though there were no future at all before her. She woke into misery.
Her pride would never let her show the world what she had discovered,
would force her to keep an unmoved face and live an unmoved life. But
the struggle between mother-instinct and revolt was still going on within
her. She was really afraid to see her baby, and she sent word to Betty
that she thought it would be safer if she kept quite quiet till the
afternoon.

She got up at noon and stole downstairs. She had not realized how
violent was her struggle over HIS child till she was passing the door of
the room where it was lying. If she had not been ordered to give up
nursing, that struggle would never have come. Her heart ached, but a
demon pressed her on and past the door. Downstairs she just pottered
round, dusting her china, putting in order the books which, after
house-cleaning, the maid had arranged almost too carefully, so that the
first volumes of Dickens and Thackeray followed each other on the top
shell, and the second volumes followed each other on the bottom shelf.
And all the time she thought dully: 'Why am I doing this? What do I care
how the place looks? It is not my home. It can never be my home!'

For lunch she drank some beef tea, keeping up the fiction of her
indisposition. After that, she sat down at her bureau to write.
Something must be decided! There she sat, her forehead on her hand, and
nothing came--not one word--not even the way to address him; just the
date, and that was all. At a ring of the bell she started up.