ling. How old?"

"Twelve. Beastly when dogs get old!"

There was another little silence while he contemplated her steadily with
his clear eyes.

"I came over to call once--with my mother; November the year before
last. Somebody was ill."

"Yes--I."

"Badly?"

Gyp shook her head.

"I heard you were married--" The little drawl in his voice had
increased, as though covering the abruptness of that remark. Gyp looked
up.

"Yes; but my little daughter and I live with my father again." What
"came over" her--as they say--to be so frank, she could not have told.

He said simply:

"Ah! I've often thought it queer I've never seen you since. What a run
that was!"

"Perfect! Was that your mother on the platform?"

"Yes--and my sister Edith. Extraordinary dead-alive place, Widrington; I
expect Mildenham isn't much better?"

"It's very quiet, but I like it."

"By the way, I don't know your name now?"

"Fiorsen."

"Oh, yes! The violinist. Life's a bit of a gamble, isn't it?"

Gyp did not answer that odd remark, did not quite know what to make of
this audacious young man, whose hazel eyes and lazy smile were queerly
lovable, but whose face in repose had such a broad gravity. He took from
his pocket a little red book.

"Do you know these? I always take them travelling. Finest things ever
written, aren't they?"

The book--Shakespeare's Sonnets--was open at that which begins:

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove--"

Gyp read on as far as the lines:

"Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom--"

and looked out of the window. The train was passing through a country
of fields and dykes, where the sun, far down in the west, shone almost
level over wide, whitish-green space, and the spotted cattle browsed
or stood by the ditches, lazily flicking their tufted tails. A shaft of
sunlight flowed into the carriage, filled with dust motes; and, handing
the little book back through that streak of radiance, she said softly:

"Yes; that's wonderful. Do you read much poetry?"

"More law, I'm afraid. But it is about the finest thing in the world,
isn't it?"

"No; I think music."

"Are you a musician?