From the beginning she had defied the regulations of the hospital, as she had defied the rules of life, with an absolute success.  The inelastic, military system bent and stretched itself beneath her good-humoured inability to believe that there could be any wilful opposition, to her desires.  The macaw had been a case in point, the gramophone another.  After tea the old woman set the instrument going for her, and when the authorities protested, ostensibly on behalf of neighbouring patients, it transpired that the patients rather liked it than otherwise, and there were regular concerts, with the macaw shrieking its occasional appreciation.

She inquired interestedly into her neighbours.  She seemed less concerned with their complaints than with their ages, their appearance, and the time when they would return to the outside world.  With a young man on her right hand she became intimate.  It began with an exchange of compliments and progressed through little folded notes which caused her infinite amusement to a system of code-tapping on the intervening wall, sufficiently scandalous in import, if her expression were significant.

The nurses became her allies in this last grim flirtation, unaware apparently of its grimness.

“Don’t you let ’im know I am so bad,” she adjured them.  “I tell ’im I ’ave a leetle nothing at all, and that I am going ’ome next week to my dear ’usband.  I think that make ‘im laugh ver’ much.  ‘E is ver’ bored, that young man.  ’E say if I ’ave supper with ’im, the first night ’e come out ’e won’t—­’ow you say?—­grouse so much.  I say my ‘usband ver’ jealous, but that I fix it some’ow.  ’E like that.  Promise you won’t tell?”

They promised.

She was almost voiceless now.  That she suffered hideously, Stonehouse knew, but not from her.  He believed—­in the turmoil of his mind he almost hoped—­that when she was alone she broke down, but before them all she bore herself with an unflagging gallantry.  It was that gallantry of hers that dogged him, that would not let him rest or forget.  It demanded of him something that he could not, and dared not, yield.

And she was pitifully alone.  The woman in the hospital had not been more forsaken by her world.  As to Gyp Labelle she went her way, and the gossip columns cautiously recorded the more startling items of that progress.  It was as though some clever hand were building up a fantastic figure that should pass at last into the mists of legend.

Men laughed together over her.

“What poor devil of a millionaire has the woman hobbled now?”

It was the matron who showed Stonehouse an illustrated paper which produced her full-length portrait.  She sat on the edge of her absurd fountain and her hand was raised in a laughing gesture of farewell.  Over the top was written:  “Gyp off to Pastures new,” and underneath a message which all the daily papers were to reproduce.