And Betty, who had feared him ever since their encounter so many years ago, eyed his profile, without daring to ask questions.  Before he reached home, Winton stopped at a post-office, and sent this telegram: 

“Gyp and the baby are with me letter follows.—­Winton.”

It salved a conscience on which that fellow’s figure in the doorway weighed; besides, it was necessary, lest Fiorsen should go to the police.  The rest must wait till he had talked with Gyp.

There was much to do, and it was late before they dined, and not till Markey had withdrawn could they begin their talk.

Close to the open windows where Markey had placed two hydrangea plants—­just bought on his own responsibility, in token of silent satisfaction—­Gyp began.  She kept nothing back, recounting the whole miserable fiasco of her marriage.  When she came to Daphne Wing and her discovery in the music-room, she could see the glowing end of her father’s cigar move convulsively.  That insult to his adored one seemed to Winton so inconceivable that, for a moment, he stopped her recital by getting up to pace the room.  In her own house—­her own house!  And—­after that, she had gone on with him!  He came back to his chair and did not interrupt again, but his stillness almost frightened her.

Coming to the incidents of the day itself, she hesitated.  Must she tell him, too, of Rosek—­was it wise, or necessary?  The all-or-nothing candour that was part of her nature prevailed, and she went straight on, and, save for the feverish jerking of his evening shoe, Winton made no sign.  When she had finished, he got up and slowly extinguished the end of his cigar against the window-sill; then looking at her lying back in her chair as if exhausted, he said:  “By God!” and turned his face away to the window.

At that hour before the theatres rose, a lull brooded in the London streets; in this quiet narrow one, the town’s hum was only broken by the clack of a half-drunken woman bickering at her man as they lurched along for home, and the strains of a street musician’s fiddle, trying to make up for a blank day.  The sound vaguely irritated Winton, reminding him of those two damnable foreigners by whom she had been so treated.  To have them at the point of a sword or pistol—­to teach them a lesson!  He heard her say: 

“Dad, I should like to pay his debts.  Then things would be as they were when I married him.”

He emitted an exasperated sound.  He did not believe in heaping coals of fire.

“I want to make sure, too, that the girl is all right till she’s over her trouble.  Perhaps I could use some of that—­that other money, if mine is all tied up?”

It was sheer anger, not disapproval of her impulse, that made him hesitate; money and revenge would never be associated in his mind.  Gyp went on: 

“I want to feel as if I’d never let him marry me.  Perhaps his debts are all part of that—­who knows?  Please!”