eath her sunshade, making unconsciously for the peace
of trees. Her mind was a whirl of impressions--Daphne Wing's figure
against the door, Mr. Wagge's puggy grey-bearded countenance, the red
pampas-grass, the blue bowl, Rosek's face swooping at her, her last
glimpse of her baby asleep under the trees!

She reached Kensington Gardens, turned into that walk renowned for the
beauty of its flowers and the plainness of the people who frequent it,
and sat down on a bench. It was near the luncheon-hour; nursemaids,
dogs, perambulators, old gentlemen--all were hurrying a little toward
their food. They glanced with critical surprise at this pretty young
woman, leisured and lonely at such an hour, trying to find out what
was wrong with her, as one naturally does with beauty--bow legs or
something, for sure, to balance a face like that! But Gyp noticed none
of them, except now and again a dog which sniffed her knees in passing.
For months she had resolutely cultivated insensibility, resolutely
refused to face reality; the barrier was forced now, and the flood had
swept her away. "Proceedings!" Mr. Wagge had said. To those who shrink
from letting their secret affairs be known even by their nearest
friends, the notion of a public exhibition of troubles simply never
comes, and it had certainly never come to Gyp. With a bitter smile she
thought: 'I'm better off than she is, after all! Suppose I loved him,
too? No, I never--never--want to love. Women who love suffer too much.'

She sat on that bench a long time before it came into her mind that she
was due at Monsieur Harmost's for a music lesson at three o'clock. It
was well past two already; and she set out across the grass. The summer
day was full of murmurings of bees and flies, cooings of blissful
pigeons, the soft swish and stir of leaves, and the scent of lime
blossom under a sky so blue, with few white clouds slow, and calm, and
full. Why be unhappy? And one of those spotty spaniel dogs, that have
broad heads, with frizzy topknots, and are always rascals, smelt at her
frock and moved round and round her, hoping that she would throw her
sunshade on the water for him to fetch, this being in his view the only
reason why anything was carried in the hand.

She found Monsieur Harmost fidgeting up and down the room, whose opened
windows could not rid it of the smell of latakia.

"Ah," he said, "I thought you were not coming! You look pale; are
you not well? Is it the heat? Or"--he