Gyp murmured desperately: 

“Oh! yes, anything.”

Though the girl was so deathly white and spiritless, it soon became clear that she was going to pull through.  With each day, a little more colour and a little more commonness came back to her.  And Gyp felt instinctively that she would, in the end, return to Fulham purged of her infatuation, a little harder, perhaps a little deeper.

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.  Gyp thought of her baby, and of that which would have been its half-brother; and now that she was so near having to go back to Fiorsen, she knew that she had not been wise to come here.  To have been in contact with the girl, to have touched, as it were, that trouble, had made the thought of life with him less tolerable even than it was before.  Only the longing to see her baby made return seem possible.  Ah, well—­she would get used to it all again!  But the anticipation of his eyes fixed on her, then sliding away from the meeting with her eyes, of all—­of all that would begin again, suddenly made her shiver.  She was very near to loathing at that moment.  He, the father of her baby!  The thought seemed ridiculous and strange.  That little creature seemed to bind him to her no more than if it were the offspring of some chance encounter, some pursuit of nymph by faun.  No!  It was hers alone.  And a sudden feverish longing to get back to it overpowered all other thought.  This longing grew in her so all night that at breakfast she told her father.  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.  He was not in, and what was evidently her telegram lay unopened in the hall.  Tremulous with expectation, she ran up to the nursery.  The pathetic sound of some small creature that cannot tell what is hurting it, or why, met her ears.  She went in, disturbed, yet with the half-triumphant thought:  ‘Perhaps that’s for me!’

Betty, very flushed, was rocking the cradle, and examining the baby’s face with a perplexed frown.  Seeing Gyp, she put her hand to her side, and gasped: 

“Oh, be joyful!  Oh, my dear!  I am glad.  I can’t do anything with baby since the morning.  Whenever she wakes up, she cries like that.  And till to-day she’s been a little model.  Hasn’t she!  There, there!”