."

"Who cares? No one could care who loves as I do. Oh, Gyp, can't you
love me? I know I'm nothing much." How quaint and boyish! "But it's
eleven weeks to-day since we met in the train. I don't think I've had
one minute's let-up since."

"Have you tried?"

"Why should I, when I love you?"

Gyp sighed; relief, delight, pain--she did not know.

"Then what is to be done? Look over there--that bit of blue in the grass
is my baby daughter. There's her--and my father--and--"

"And what?"

"I'm afraid--afraid of love, Bryan!"

At that first use of his name, Summerhay turned pale and seized her hand.

"Afraid--how--afraid?"

Gyp said very low:

"I might love too much. Don't say any more now. No; don't! Let's go in
and have lunch." And she got up.

He stayed till tea-time, and not a word more of love did he speak. But
when he was gone, she sat under the pine-tree with little Gyp on her lap.
Love! If her mother had checked love, she herself would never have been
born. The midges were biting before she went in. After watching Betty
give little Gyp her bath, she crossed the passage to her bedroom and
leaned out of the window. Could it have been to-day she had lain on the
ground with tears of despair running down on to her hands? Away to the
left of the pine-tree, the moon had floated up, soft, barely visible in
the paling sky. A new world, an enchanted garden! And between her and
it--what was there?

That evening she sat with a book on her lap, not reading; and in her went
on the strange revolution which comes in the souls of all women who are
not half-men when first they love--the sinking of 'I' into 'Thou,' the
passionate, spiritual subjection, the intense, unconscious giving-up of
will, in preparation for completer union.

She slept without dreaming, awoke heavy and oppressed. Too languid to
bathe, she sat listless on the beach with little Gyp all the morning.
Had she energy or spirit to meet him in the afternoon by the rock
archway, as she had promised? For the first time since she was a small
and naughty child, she avoided the eyes of Betty. One could not be afraid
of that stout, devoted soul, but one could feel that she knew too much.
When the time came, after early tea, she started out; for if she did not
go, he would come, and she did not want the servants to see him two days
running.

This last day of August was warm and still, and had a kind of
beneficence--the corn all gathered in