r talk--you go. Understand
me, you go, and you never see Gyp again! In the meantime you will do
what I ask. Gyp is my adopted daughter."

She had always been a little afraid of him, but she had never seen that
look in his eyes or heard him speak in that voice. And she bent her
full moon of a face and went, with her apron crumpled as apron had never
been, and tears in her eyes. And Winton, at the window, watching the
darkness gather, the leaves flying by on a sou'-westerly wind, drank to
the dregs a cup of bitter triumph. He had never had the right to that
dead, forever-loved mother of his child. He meant to have the child.
If tongues must wag, let them! This was a defeat of all his previous
precaution, a deep victory of natural instinct. And his eyes narrowed
and stared into the darkness.

II

In spite of his victory over all human rivals in the heart of Gyp,
Winton had a rival whose strength he fully realized perhaps for the
first time now that she was gone, and he, before the fire, was brooding
over her departure and the past. Not likely that one of his decisive
type, whose life had so long been bound up with swords and horses,
would grasp what music might mean to a little girl. Such ones, he knew,
required to be taught scales, and "In a Cottage near a Wood" with other
melodies. He took care not to go within sound of them, so that he had
no conception of the avidity with which Gyp had mopped up all, and more
than all, her governess could teach her. He was blind to the rapture
with which she listened to any stray music that came its way to
Mildenham--to carols in the Christmas dark, to certain hymns, and one
special "Nunc Dimittis" in the village church, attended with a hopeless
regularity; to the horn of the hunter far out in the quivering, dripping
coverts; even to Markey's whistling, which was full and strangely sweet.

He could share her love of dogs and horses, take an anxious interest
in her way of catching bumblebees in the hollow of her hand and putting
them to her small, delicate ears to hear them buzz, sympathize with her
continual ravages among the flowerbeds, in the old-fashioned garden,
full of lilacs and laburnums in spring, pinks, roses, cornflowers in
summer, dahlias and sunflowers in autumn, and always a little neglected
and overgrown, a little squeezed in, and elbowed by the more important
surrounding paddocks. He could sympathize with her attempts to draw
his attention to the song of birds; b