tress of the situation! The wrap must be placed
exactly on her shoulders; and how she walked, giving just one startled
look back from the door. Gone! The ordeal over! And Gyp said:

"Let's go up, darling."

She felt as if they had both escaped a deadly peril--not from anything
those two could do to him or her, but from the cruel ache and jealousy of
the past, which the sight of that man would have brought him.

Women, for their age, are surely older than men--married women, at all
events, than men who have not had that experience. And all through those
first weeks of their life together, there was a kind of wise watchfulness
in Gyp. He was only a boy in knowledge of life as she saw it, and though
his character was so much more decided, active, and insistent than her
own, she felt it lay with her to shape the course and avoid the shallows
and sunken rocks. The house they had seen together near the river, under
the Berkshire downs, was still empty; and while it was being got ready,
they lived at a London hotel. She had insisted that he should tell no
one of their life together. If that must come, she wanted to be firmly
settled in, with little Gyp and Betty and the horses, so that it should
all be for him as much like respectable married life as possible. But,
one day, in the first week after their return, while in her room, just
back from a long day's shopping, a card was brought up to her: "Lady
Summerhay." Her first impulse was to be "not at home"; her second, "I'd
better face it. Bryan would wish me to see her!" When the page-boy was
gone, she turned to the mirror and looked at herself doubtfully. She
seemed to know exactly what that tall woman whom she had seen on the
platform would think of her--too soft, not capable, not right for
him!--not even if she were legally his wife. And touching her hair,
laying a dab of scent on her eyebrows, she turned and went downstairs
fluttering, but outwardly calm enough.

In the little low-roofed inner lounge of that old hotel, whose rooms were
all "entirely renovated," Gyp saw her visitor standing at a table,
rapidly turning the pages of an illustrated magazine, as people will when
their minds are set upon a coming operation. And she thought: 'I believe
she's more frightened than I am!'

Lady Summerhay held out a gloved hand.

"How do you do?" she said. "I hope you'll forgive my coming."

Gyp took the hand.

"Thank you. It was very good of you. I'm sorry B