She let the brush rest on her knee, thinking again of that walk with her baby through empty, silent streets, in the early misty morning last October, of waiting dead-tired outside here, on the pavement, ringing till they let her in.  Often, since, she had wondered how fear could have worked her up to that weird departure.  She only knew that it had not been unnatural at the time.  Her father and Aunt Rosamund had wanted her to try for a divorce, and no doubt they had been right.  But her instincts had refused, still refused to let everyone know her secrets and sufferings—­still refused the hollow pretence involved, that she had loved him when she never had.  No, it had been her fault for marrying him without love—­

     “Love is not love
      Which alters when it alteration finds!”

What irony—­giving her that to read—­if her fellow traveller had only known!

She got up from before the mirror, and stood looking round her room, the room she had always slept in as a girl.  So he had remembered her all this time!  It had not seemed like meeting a stranger.  They were not strangers now, anyway.  And, suddenly, on the wall before her, she saw his face; or, if not, what was so like that she gave a little gasp.  Of course!  How stupid of her not to have known at once!  There, in a brown frame, hung a photograph of the celebrated Botticelli or Masaccio “Head of a Young Man” in the National Gallery.  She had fallen in love with it years ago, and on the wall of her room it had been ever since.  That broad face, the clear eyes, the bold, clean-cut mouth, the audacity—­only, the live face was English, not Italian, had more humour, more “breeding,” less poetry—­something “old Georgian” about it.  How he would laugh if she told him he was like that peasant acolyte with fluffed-out hair, and a little ruching round his neck!  And, smiling, Gyp plaited her own hair and got into bed.

But she could not sleep; she heard her father come in and go up to his room, heard the clocks strike midnight, and one, and two, and always the dull roar of Piccadilly.  She had nothing over her but a sheet, and still it was too hot.  There was a scent in the room, as of honeysuckle.  Where could it come from?  She got up at last, and went to the window.  There, on the window-sill, behind the curtains, was a bowl of jessamine.  Her father must have brought it up for her—­just like him to think of that!

And, burying her nose in those white blossoms, she was visited by a memory of her first ball—­that evening of such delight and disillusionment.  Perhaps Bryan Summerhay had been there—­all that time ago!  If he had been introduced to her then, if she had happened to dance with him instead of with that man who had kissed her arm, might she not have felt different toward all men?  And if he had admired her—­and had not everyone, that night—­might she not have liked, perhaps more than liked, him in return?  Or would she have looked on him as on all her swains before she met Fiorsen, so many moths fluttering round a candle, foolish to singe themselves, not to be taken seriously?  Perhaps she had been bound to have her lesson, to be humbled and brought low!