wn every woman in the room! Should
she pretend to feel faint and slip out into the hotel? Or let Bryan
know? Or sit there laughing and talking, eating and drinking, as if
nothing were behind her?

Her own face in the mirror had a flush, and her eyes were bright. When
they saw her, they would see that she was happy, safe in her love. Her
foot sought Summerhay's beneath the table. How splendid and brown and
fit he looked, compared with those two pale, towny creatures! And he
was gazing at her as though just discovering her beauty. How could
she ever--that man with his little beard and his white face and those
eyes--how could she ever! Ugh! And then, in the mirror, she saw Rosek's
dark-circled eyes fasten on her and betray their recognition by a sudden
gleam, saw his lips compressed, and a faint red come up in his cheeks.
What would he do? The girl's back was turned--her perfect back--and she
was eating. And Fiorsen was staring straight before him in that moody
way she knew so well. All depended on that deadly little man, who had
once kissed her throat. A sick feeling seized on Gyp. If her lover knew
that within five yards of him were those two men! But she still
smiled and talked, and touched his foot. Rosek had seen that she was
conscious--was getting from it a kind of satisfaction. She saw him lean
over and whisper to the girl, and Daphne Wing turning to look, and her
mouth opening for a smothered "Oh!" Gyp saw her give an uneasy glance at
Fiorsen, and then begin again to eat. Surely she would want to get away
before he saw. Yes; very soon she rose. What little airs of the world
she had now--quite mistress of the situation! The wrap must be placed
exactly on her shoulders; and how she walked, giving just one startled
look back from the door. Gone! The ordeal over! And Gyp said:

"Let's go up, darling."

She felt as if they had both escaped a deadly peril--not from anything
those two could do to him or her, but from the cruel ache and jealousy
of the past, which the sight of that man would have brought him.

Women, for their age, are surely older than men--married women, at all
events, than men who have not had that experience. And all through
those first weeks of their life together, there was a kind of wise
watchfulness in Gyp. He was only a boy in knowledge of life as she
saw it, and though his character was so much more decided, active, and
insistent than her own, she felt it lay with her to shape the course and