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The doctor at Mildenham, once consulted on a bout of headache, had called her eyes "perfect organs," and certainly no eyes could take things in more swiftly or completely. She was attractive to dogs, and every now and then one would stop, in two minds whether or no to put his nose into this foreign girl's hand.
Swallowing down whatever his feeling may have been, he said: "Very well, my child; I'll come up with you." Putting her into the cab in London, he asked: "Have you still got your key of Bury Street? Good! Remember, Gyp any time day or night there it is for you." She had wired to Fiorsen from Mildenham that she was coming, and she reached home soon after three.
And yet, except at week-ends, when she went back to her baby at Mildenham, she saw Summerhay most days in the Row, at the opera, or at Bury Street. She had a habit of going to St. James's Park in the late afternoon and sitting there by the water. Was it by chance that he passed one day on his way home from chambers, and that, after this, they sat there together constantly?
Markey, for her father, she knew, was at Mildenham, hunting, and would not be up till Sunday! And she thought: 'I'll leave the letter, go back to the Strand, have some tea, and try again. She took out the letter, with a sort of prayer pushed it through the slit of the door, heard it fall into its wire cage; then slowly descended the stairs to the outer passage into Temple Lane.
Late one afternoon toward the end of her week at Mildenham, Gyp wandered again into the coppice, and sat down on that same log. An hour before sunset, the light shone level on the yellowing leaves all round her; a startled rabbit pelted out of the bracken and pelted back again, and, from the far edge of the little wood, a jay cackled harshly, shifting its perch from tree to tree.
"No, no! No good reason to take you from me." "There is! The girl who is just going to have your child is staying near Mildenham, and I want to see how she is." He let go of her then, and recoiling against the divan, sat down. And Gyp thought: 'I'm sorry. I didn't mean to but it serves him right. He muttered, in a dull voice: "Oh, I hoped she was dead." "Yes! For all you care, she might be.
When he had given her news of Mildenham and little Gyp, he looked at her steadily, and said: "The coast'll be clear for you both down there, and at Bury Street, whenever you like to come, Gyp. I shall regard this as your real marriage. I shall have the servants in and make that plain."
It was one thing to put up with embraces, quite another to pretend that. When at last he was gone, she sat smoothing her hair, staring before her with hard eyes, thinking: "Here where I saw him with that girl! What animals men are!" Late that afternoon, she reached Mildenham. Winton met her at the station. And on the drive up, they passed the cottage where Daphne Wing was staying.
After that early-morning escape, Fiorsen had lurked after her for weeks, in town, at Mildenham, followed them even to Scotland, where Winton had carried her off. But she had not weakened in her resolution a second time, and suddenly he had given up pursuit, and gone abroad. Since then nothing had come from him, save a few wild or maudlin letters, written evidently during drinking-bouts.
Beyond measure beyond death it nearly kills. But one wouldn't have been without it. Why? Three days later, leaving Gyp with his sister, he went back to Mildenham to start the necessary alterations in the cottages. He had told no one he was coming, and walked up from the station on a perfect June day, bright and hot.
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