ted Winton, reminding him of
those two damnable foreigners by whom she had been so treated. To have
them at the point of a sword or pistol--to teach them a lesson! He heard
her say:

"Dad, I should like to pay his debts. Then things would be as they were
when I married him."

He emitted an exasperated sound. He did not believe in heaping coals of
fire.

"I want to make sure, too, that the girl is all right till she's over her
trouble. Perhaps I could use some of that--that other money, if mine is
all tied up?"

It was sheer anger, not disapproval of her impulse, that made him
hesitate; money and revenge would never be associated in his mind. Gyp
went on:

"I want to feel as if I'd never let him marry me. Perhaps his debts are
all part of that--who knows? Please!"

Winton looked at her. How like--when she said that "Please!" How
like--her figure sunk back in the old chair, and the face lifted in
shadow! A sort of exultation came to him. He had got her back--had got
her back!

XVIII

Fiorsen's bedroom was--as the maid would remark--"a proper pigsty"--until
he was out of it and it could be renovated each day. He had a talent for
disorder, so that the room looked as if three men instead of one had gone
to bed in it. Clothes and shoes, brushes, water, tumblers,
breakfast-tray, newspapers, French novels, and cigarette-ends--none were
ever where they should have been; and the stale fumes from the many
cigarettes he smoked before getting up incommoded anyone whose duty it
was to take him tea and shaving-water. When, on that first real summer
day, the maid had brought Rosek up to him, he had been lying a long time
on his back, dreamily watching the smoke from his cigarette and four
flies waltzing in the sunlight that filtered through the green
sun-blinds. This hour, before he rose, was his creative moment, when he
could best see the form of music and feel inspiration for its rendering.
Of late, he had been stale and wretched, all that side of him dull; but
this morning he felt again the delicious stir of fancy, that vibrating,
half-dreamy state when emotion seems so easily to find shape and the mind
pierces through to new expression. Hearing the maid's knock, and her
murmured: "Count Rosek to see you, sir," he thought: 'What the devil does
he want?' A larger nature, drifting without control, in contact with a
smaller one, who knows his own mind exactly, will instinctively be
irritable, though he