hed out: "Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen!" and, bending over that hand,
kissed it. Gyp saw that her new glove was wet. Then the girl relapsed,
her feet a little forward, her head a little forward, her back against
the door. Gyp, who knew why she stood thus, was swept again by those
two emotions--rage against men, and fellow feeling for one about to go
through what she herself had just endured.

"It's all right," she said, gently; "only, what's to be done?"

Daphne Wing put her hands up over her white face and sobbed. She sobbed
so quietly but so terribly deeply that Gyp herself had the utmost
difficulty not to cry. It was the sobbing of real despair by a creature
bereft of hope and strength, above all, of love--the sort of weeping
which is drawn from desolate, suffering souls only by the touch of
fellow feeling. And, instead of making Gyp glad or satisfying her sense
of justice, it filled her with more rage against her husband--that he
had taken this girl's infatuation for his pleasure and then thrown her
away. She seemed to see him discarding that clinging, dove-fair girl,
for cloying his senses and getting on his nerves, discarding her with
caustic words, to abide alone the consequences of her infatuation. She
put her hand timidly on that shaking shoulder, and stroked it. For a
moment the sobbing stopped, and the girl said brokenly:

"Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, I do love him so!" At those naive words, a painful
wish to laugh seized on Gyp, making her shiver from head to foot. Daphne
Wing saw it, and went on: "I know--I know--it's awful; but I do--and
now he--he--" Her quiet but really dreadful sobbing broke out again. And
again Gyp began stroking and stroking her shoulder. "And I have been so
awful to you! Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, do forgive me, please!"

All Gyp could find to answer, was:

"Yes, yes; that's nothing! Don't cry--don't cry!"

Very slowly the sobbing died away, till it was just a long shivering,
but still the girl held her hands over her face and her face down. Gyp
felt paralyzed. The unhappy girl, the red and green room, the smell of
mutton--creeping!

At last, a little of that white face showed; the lips, no longer craving
for sugar-plums, murmured:

"It's you he--he--really loves all the time. And you don't love
him--that's what's so funny--and--and--I can't understand it. Oh, Mrs.
Fiorsen, if I could see him--just see him! He told me never to come
again; and I haven't dared. I haven't seen him for three weeks--not
since