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Updated: June 17, 2025
The return to Mildenham was made by easy stages nearly two months after Summerhay's death, on New Year's day Mildenham, dark, smelling the same, full of ghosts of the days before love began. For little Gyp, more than five years old now, and beginning to understand life, this was the pleasantest home yet.
Wishing first to settle this matter of the deed, he put off going down to Mildenham; but "not trusting those two scoundrels a yard" for he never failed to bracket Rosek and Fiorsen he insisted that the baby should not go out without two attendants, and that Gyp should not go out alone.
She closed and sealed the letter, and sat down to wait for her father. And she thought: 'Why does one have a heart? Why is there in one something so much too soft? Ten days later, at Mildenham station, holding her father's hand, Gyp could scarcely see him for the mist before her eyes. How good he had been to her all those last days, since she told him that she was going to take the plunge!
Running up for the week-end, three days later, he was relieved to find her decidedly perked-up, and left her again with the easier heart. It was on the day after he went back to Mildenham that she received a letter from Fiorsen, forwarded from Bury Street. He was it said just returning to London; he had not forgotten any look she had ever given him, or any word she had spoken.
They had two more runs, but nothing like that first gallop. Nor did she again see the young man, whose name it seemed was Summerhay, son of a certain Lady Summerhay at Widrington, ten miles from Mildenham. All that long, silent jog home with Winton in fading daylight, she felt very happy saturated with air and elation.
And curious were her feelings light-hearted, compunctious, as of one who escapes yet knows she will soon be seeking to return. The meet was rather far next day, but she insisted on riding to it, since old Pettance, the superannuated jockey, charitably employed as extra stable help at Mildenham, was to bring on her second horse.
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?"
Physically, Gyp grew strong again, but since their return to Mildenham, she had never once gone outside the garden, never once spoken of The Red House, never once of Summerhay. Winton had hoped that warmth and sunlight would bring some life to her spirit, but it did not seem to. Not that she cherished her grief, appeared, rather, to do all in her power to forget and mask it.
And, though no breath of gossip came to Winton's ears, no women visited at Mildenham. Save for the friendly casual acquaintanceships of churchyard, hunting-field, and local race-meetings, Gyp grew up knowing hardly any of her own sex.
He was blind to the rapture with which she listened to any stray music that came its way to Mildenham to carols in the Christmas dark, to certain hymns, and one special "Nunc Dimittis" in the village church, attended with a hopeless regularity; to the horn of the hunter far out in the quivering, dripping coverts; even to Markey's whistling, which was full and strangely sweet.
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