She once remarked uncannily to Winton:

"Mum doesn't live with us, Grandy; she lives away somewhere, I think. Is
it with Baryn?"

Winton stared, and answered:

"Perhaps it is, sweetheart; but don't say that to anybody but me. Don't
ever talk of Baryn to anyone else."

"Yes, I know; but where is he, Grandy?"

What could Winton answer? Some imbecility with the words "very far" in
it; for he had not courage to broach the question of death, that mystery
so hopelessly beyond the grasp of children, and of himself--and others.

He rode a great deal with the child, who, like her mother before her, was
never so happy as in the saddle; but to Gyp he did not dare suggest it.
She never spoke of horses, never went to the stables, passed all the days
doing little things about the house, gardening, and sitting at her piano,
sometimes playing a little, sometimes merely looking at the keys, her
hands clasped in her lap. This was early in the fateful summer, before
any as yet felt the world-tremors, or saw the Veil of the Temple rending
and the darkness beginning to gather. Winton had no vision of the coif
above the dark eyes of his loved one, nor of himself in a strange brown
garb, calling out old familiar words over barrack-squares. He often
thought: 'If only she had something to take her out of herself!'

In June he took his courage in both hands and proposed a visit to London.
To his surprise, she acquiesced without hesitation. They went up in
Whit-week. While they were passing Widrington, he forced himself to an
unnatural spurt of talk; and it was not till fully quarter of an hour
later that, glancing stealthily round his paper, he saw her sitting
motionless, her face turned to the fields and tears rolling down it. And
he dared not speak, dared not try to comfort her. She made no sound, the
muscles of her face no movement; only, those tears kept rolling down.
And, behind his paper, Winton's eyes narrowed and retreated; his face
hardened till the skin seemed tight drawn over the bones, and every inch
of him quivered.

The usual route from the station to Bury Street was "up," and the cab
went by narrow by-streets, town lanes where the misery of the world is on
show, where ill-looking men, draggled and over-driven women, and the
jaunty ghosts of little children in gutters and on doorsteps proclaim, by
every feature of their clay-coloured faces and every movement of their
unfed bodies, the post-datement of the millenniu