little old dark manor house, whose stables alone
were up to date--three hours from London, and some thirty miles from The
Wash, it must be confessed that her upbringing lacked modernity. About
twice a year, Winton took her up to town to stay with his unmarried
sister Rosamund in Curzon Street. Those weeks, if they did nothing else,
increased her natural taste for charming clothes, fortified her teeth,
and fostered her passion for music and the theatre. But the two main
nourishments of the modern girl--discussion and games--she lacked
utterly. Moreover, those years of her life from fifteen to nineteen were
before the social resurrection of 1906, and the world still crawled like
a winter fly on a window-pane. Winton was a Tory, Aunt Rosamund a Tory,
everybody round her a Tory. The only spiritual development she underwent
all those years of her girlhood was through her headlong love for her
father. After all, was there any other way in which she could really
have developed? Only love makes fruitful the soul. The sense of form
that both had in such high degree prevented much demonstration; but
to be with him, do things for him, to admire, and credit him with
perfection; and, since she could not exactly wear the same clothes or
speak in the same clipped, quiet, decisive voice, to dislike the clothes
and voices of other men--all this was precious to her beyond everything.
If she inherited from him that fastidious sense of form, she also
inherited his capacity for putting all her eggs in one basket. And since
her company alone gave him real happiness, the current of love flowed
over her heart all the time. Though she never realized it, abundant love
FOR somebody was as necessary to her as water running up the stems of
flowers, abundant love FROM somebody as needful as sunshine on
their petals. And Winton's somewhat frequent little runs to town, to
Newmarket, or where not, were always marked in her by a fall of the
barometer, which recovered as his return grew near.

One part of her education, at all events, was not neglected--cultivation
of an habitual sympathy with her poorer neighbours. Without concerning
himself in the least with problems of sociology, Winton had by nature
an open hand and heart for cottagers, and abominated interference with
their lives. And so it came about that Gyp, who, by nature also never
set foot anywhere without invitation, was always hearing the words:
"Step in, Miss Gyp"; "Step in, and sit down, lo