nted with white and yellow marguerites stood
before a fireplace filled with pampas-grass dyed red. The chairs were of
red morocco, the curtains a brownish-red, the walls green, and on them
hung a set of Landseer prints. The peculiar sensation which red and
green in juxtaposition produce on the sensitive was added to Gyp's
distress. And, suddenly, her eyes lighted on a little deep-blue china
bowl. It stood on a black stand on the mantel-piece, with nothing in it.
To Gyp, in this room of red and green, with the smell of mutton creeping
in, that bowl was like the crystallized whiff of another world. Daphne
Wing--not Daisy Wagge--had surely put it there! And, somehow, it touched
her--emblem of stifled beauty, emblem of all that the girl had tried to
pour out to her that August afternoon in her garden nearly a year ago.
Thin Eastern china, good and really beautiful! A wonder they allowed it
to pollute this room!

A sigh made her turn round. With her back against the door and a white,
scared face, the girl was standing. Gyp thought: 'She has suffered
horribly.' And, going impulsively up to her, she held out her hand.

Daphne Wing sighed out: "Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen!" and, bending over that hand,
kissed it. Gyp saw that her new glove was wet. Then the girl relapsed,
her feet a little forward, her head a little forward, her back against
the door. Gyp, who knew why she stood thus, was swept again by those two
emotions--rage against men, and fellow feeling for one about to go
through what she herself had just endured.

"It's all right," she said, gently; "only, what's to be done?"

Daphne Wing put her hands up over her white face and sobbed. She sobbed
so quietly but so terribly deeply that Gyp herself had the utmost
difficulty not to cry. It was the sobbing of real despair by a creature
bereft of hope and strength, above all, of love--the sort of weeping
which is drawn from desolate, suffering souls only by the touch of fellow
feeling. And, instead of making Gyp glad or satisfying her sense of
justice, it filled her with more rage against her husband--that he had
taken this girl's infatuation for his pleasure and then thrown her away.
She seemed to see him discarding that clinging, dove-fair girl, for
cloying his senses and getting on his nerves, discarding her with caustic
words, to abide alone the consequences of her infatuation. She put her
hand timidly on that shaking shoulder, and stroked it. For a moment the
so