r imagination
was not great, but he stimulated it. If he wrote a pungent line on
Daudet or Whistler, on Montaigne or Fielding, she was stimulated to know
them. One day he sent her Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he had picked
up in New York on his way to England. This startled her. She had
never heard of Whitman. To her he seemed coarse, incomprehensible,
ungentlemanly. She could not understand how Gaston could say beautiful
things about Montaigne and about Whitman too. She had no conception how
he had in him the strain of that first Sir Gaston Belward, and was also
the son of a half-heathen.

He interested her all the more. Her letters were hardly so fascinating
to him. She was beautifully correct, but she could not make a sentence
breathe. He was grateful, but nothing stirred in him. He could live
without her--that he knew regretfully. But he did his part with sincere
intention.

That was up to the day when he saw Andree as Mademoiselle Victorine.
Then came a swift change. Day after day he visited her, always in the
presence of Annette. Soon they dined often together, still in Annette's
presence, and the severity of that rule was never relaxed.

Count Ploare came no more; he had received his dismissal. Occasionally
Gaston visited the menagerie, but generally after the performance, when
Victorine had a half-hour's or an hour's romp with her animals. This was
a pleasant time to Gaston. The wild life in him responded.

These were hours when the girl was quite naive and natural, when she
spent herself in ripe enjoyment--almost child-like, healthy. At other
times there was an indefinable something which Gaston had not noticed in
England. But then he had only seen her once. She, too, saw something in
him unnoticed before. It was on his tongue a hundred times to tell her
that that something was Delia Gasgoyne. He did not. Perhaps because it
seemed so grotesque, perhaps because it was easier to drift. Besides, as
he said to himself, he would soon go to join the yacht at Gibraltar,
and all this would be over-over. All this? All what? A gipsy, a
dompteuse--what was she to him? She interested him, he liked her, and
she liked him, but there had been nothing more between them. Near as he
was to her now, he very often saw her in his mind's eye as she passed
over Ridley Common, looking towards him, her eyes shaded by her hand.

She, too, had continually said to herself that this man could be nothing
to her--nothing, never! Yet