She was serious.  She meant it.  If she survived she survived as what she was or not at all.  And looking down on her wasted, tortured body, Stonehouse had a momentary but extraordinarily vivid conviction that what she had said was true.  She would persist.  Whatever else happened, Gyp Labelle would go on having a good time.  She could not be extinguished.  There was in her some virtue altogether apart from the body—­a blazing vitality, an unquenchable, burning spirit.

He felt his hatred of her wither before it.

“And ’e say:  ‘You dance ver’ bad, Gyp, but you make me laugh.  You go on and dance to ze others.’  For ’e know who I am.  My poor parents they make ze mistake.  They think:  ‘’Ere is such a ver’ nice, good little bebe, and so they call me after my Maman, who is ver’ nice and good too, and who love me ver’ much—­Marie—­Marie Dubois.”

She turned her head towards the old woman bending lower and lower over her fine work, and, smiling at her, fell asleep.

He returned, one night, to the hospital in the hope of being able to work in the laboratory, and instead, coming to her room, he went in.  The action was so unpremeditated and unmotivated that he had closed the door before he knew what he had done.  But the excuse he framed in his confusion was never uttered, for he had the right to appear dumbfounded.  She sat, propped up like a painted wraith against a pile of gorgeous cushions, and all about her was scattered a barbarous loot of rings and bracelets, of strings of pearls, of unset stones, diamonds and emeralds, heaped carelessly on the table at her side, and twinkling like little malevolent eyes out of the creases of her coverlet.

The old woman wrote toilingly on a slip of paper.  “Sh!  This is ver’ solemn.  I could not sleep, and so I make my testament.”  She put her finger to her lips as though her whisper were only a part of a playful mystery and beckoned him, and he went towards her, reluctant, yet unresisting like a man hypnotized.  He had a childish longing to touch all that colour, to take up great handfuls of it and feel its warmth and let it drip through his fingers.  The death that stared out of her painted face, the silence and grim austerity of her surroundings made that display of magnificence a fantastic parable.  The stones were the life that was going from her.  She picked up each one in turn and caressed it, and held it to the light, remembering who knew what escapade, what splendid, reckless days, what tragedy.  And yet there was no regret and surely no remorse in her farewell of them.

“Ma Vieille—­she make a list of all.  They will be sold—­for ze children of Paris—­ze gamins—­as I was—­for a good time.”  She held out her hand:  “C’est joli, n’est ce pas?”

He looked unwillingly.  It was a black opal, and as she moved it it seemed to come to life, and a distant resentful fire gleamed out of its sullen depths.