oosening, something in him had given
way--as when, in winding a watch, the key turns on and on, the ratchet
being broken. Yet he was certainly working hard--perhaps harder than
ever. She would hear him, across the garden, going over and over a
passage, as if he never would be satisfied. But his playing seemed
to her to have lost its fire and sweep; to be stale, and as if
disillusioned. It was all as though he had said to himself: "What's the
use?" In his face, too, there was a change. She knew--she was certain
that he was drinking secretly. Was it his failure with her? Was it the
girl? Was it simply heredity from a hard-drinking ancestry?

Gyp never faced these questions. To face them would mean useless
discussion, useless admission that she could not love him, useless
asseveration from him about the girl, which she would not believe,
useless denials of all sorts. Hopeless!

He was very irritable, and seemed especially to resent her music
lessons, alluding to them with a sort of sneering impatience. She felt
that he despised them as amateurish, and secretly resented it. He was
often impatient, too, of the time she gave to the baby. His own conduct
with the little creature was like all the rest of him. He would go to
the nursery, much to Betty's alarm, and take up the baby; be charming
with it for about ten minutes, then suddenly dump it back into its
cradle, stare at it gloomily or utter a laugh, and go out. Sometimes,
he would come up when Gyp was there, and after watching her a little in
silence, almost drag her away.

Suffering always from the guilty consciousness of having no love for
him, and ever more and more from her sense that, instead of saving
him she was, as it were, pushing him down-hill--ironical nemesis for
vanity!--Gyp was ever more and more compliant to his whims, trying to
make up. But this compliance, when all the time she felt further and
further away, was straining her to breaking-point. Hers was a nature
that goes on passively enduring till something snaps; after that--no
more.

Those months of spring and summer were like a long spell of drought,
when moisture gathers far away, coming nearer, nearer, till, at last,
the deluge bursts and sweeps the garden.

XV

The tenth of July that year was as the first day of summer. There had
been much fine weather, but always easterly or northerly; now, after a
broken, rainy fortnight, the sun had come in full summer warmth with
a gentle breeze, dri