it with
desperation. It was a good baby, silent, somewhat understanding. In
watching its face, and feeling it warm against her, Gyp succeeded daily
in getting away into the hypnotic state of mothers, and cows that chew
the cud. But the baby slept a great deal, and much of its time was
claimed by Betty. Those hours, and they were many, Gyp found difficult.
She had lost interest in dress and household elegance, keeping just
enough to satisfy her fastidiousness; money, too, was scarce, under the
drain of Fiorsen's irregular requirements. If she read, she began almost
at once to brood. She was cut off from the music-room, had not crossed
its threshold since her discovery. Aunt Rosamund's efforts to take her
into society were fruitless--all the effervescence was out of that, and,
though her father came, he never stayed long for fear of meeting Fiorsen.
In this condition of affairs, she turned more and more to her own music,
and one morning, after she had come across some compositions of her
girlhood, she made a resolution. That afternoon she dressed herself with
pleasure, for the first time for months, and sallied forth into the
February frost.

Monsieur Edouard Harmost inhabited the ground floor of a house in the
Marylebone Road. He received his pupils in a large back room overlooking
a little sooty garden. A Walloon by extraction, and of great vitality,
he grew old with difficulty, having a soft corner in his heart for women,
and a passion for novelty, even for new music, that was unappeasable.
Any fresh discovery would bring a tear rolling down his mahogany cheeks
into his clipped grey beard, the while he played, singing wheezily to
elucidate the wondrous novelty; or moved his head up and down, as if
pumping.

When Gyp was shown into this well-remembered room he was seated, his
yellow fingers buried in his stiff grey hair, grieving over a pupil who
had just gone out. He did not immediately rise, but stared hard at Gyp.

"Ah," he said, at last, "my little old friend! She has come back! Now
that is good!" And, patting her hand he looked into her face, which had
a warmth and brilliance rare to her in these days. Then, making for the
mantelpiece, he took therefrom a bunch of Parma violets, evidently
brought by his last pupil, and thrust them under her nose. "Take them,
take them--they were meant for me. Now--how much have you forgotten?
Come!" And, seizing her by the elbow, he almost forced her to the piano