that matter?"

Winton answered testily:

"It matters very much to me--the impudence of it!" His mouth relaxed in
a grim little smile: "Ah, well--there's not much to choose between us
so far as condemning our neighbours goes. 'Charity Stakes--also ran,
Charles Clare Winton, the Church, and Mrs. Grundy.'"

They opened out to each other more in those few days at Tunbridge Wells
than they had for years. Whether the process of bathing softened his
crust, or the air that Mr. Wagge found "a bit--er--too irony, as you
might say," had upon Winton the opposite effect, he certainly relaxed
that first duty of man, the concealment of his spirit, and disclosed his
activities as he never had before--how such and such a person had been
set on his feet, so and so sent out to Canada, this man's wife helped
over her confinement, that man's daughter started again after a slip.
And Gyp's child-worship of him bloomed anew.

On the last afternoon of their stay, she strolled out with him through
one of the long woods that stretched away behind their hotel. Excited by
the coming end of her self-inflicted penance, moved by the beauty among
those sunlit trees, she found it difficult to talk. But Winton, about to
lose her, was quite loquacious. Starting from the sinister change in the
racing-world--so plutocratic now, with the American seat, the increase
of bookmaking owners, and other tragic occurrences--he launched forth
into a jeremiad on the condition of things in general. Parliament,
he thought, especially now that members were paid, had lost its
self-respect; the towns had eaten up the country; hunting was
threatened; the power and vulgarity of the press were appalling;
women had lost their heads; and everybody seemed afraid of having any
"breeding." By the time little Gyp was Gyp's age, they would all be
under the thumb of Watch Committees, live in Garden Cities, and have to
account for every half-crown they spent, and every half-hour of their
time; the horse, too, would be an extinct animal, brought out once a
year at the lord-mayor's show. He hoped--the deuce--he might not be
alive to see it. And suddenly he added: "What do you think happens after
death, Gyp?"

They were sitting on one of those benches that crop up suddenly in the
heart of nature. All around them briars and bracken were just on the
turn; and the hum of flies, the vague stir of leaves and life formed but
a single sound. Gyp, gazing into the wood, answered:

"Nothing