after the theatre in their restaurant, when, in a mirror she saw three people come in and take seats at a table a little way behind—­ Fiorsen, Rosek, and Daphne Wing!  How she managed to show no sign she never knew!  While they were ordering, she was safe, for Rosek was a gourmet, and the girl would certainly be hungry; but after that, she knew that nothing could save her being seen—­Rosek would mark down every woman in the room!  Should she pretend to feel faint and slip out into the hotel?  Or let Bryan know?  Or sit there laughing and talking, eating and drinking, as if nothing were behind her?

Her own face in the mirror had a flush, and her eyes were bright.  When they saw her, they would see that she was happy, safe in her love.  Her foot sought Summerhay’s beneath the table.  How splendid and brown and fit he looked, compared with those two pale, towny creatures!  And he was gazing at her as though just discovering her beauty.  How could she ever—­that man with his little beard and his white face and those eyes—­how could she ever!  Ugh!  And then, in the mirror, she saw Rosek’s dark-circled eyes fasten on her and betray their recognition by a sudden gleam, saw his lips compressed, and a faint red come up in his cheeks.  What would he do?  The girl’s back was turned—­her perfect back—­and she was eating.  And Fiorsen was staring straight before him in that moody way she knew so well.  All depended on that deadly little man, who had once kissed her throat.  A sick feeling seized on Gyp.  If her lover knew that within five yards of him were those two men!  But she still smiled and talked, and touched his foot.  Rosek had seen that she was conscious—­was getting from it a kind of satisfaction.  She saw him lean over and whisper to the girl, and Daphne Wing turning to look, and her mouth opening for a smothered “Oh!” Gyp saw her give an uneasy glance at Fiorsen, and then begin again to eat.  Surely she would want to get away before he saw.  Yes; very soon she rose.  What little airs of the world she had now—­quite mistress of the situation!  The wrap must be placed exactly on her shoulders; and how she walked, giving just one startled look back from the door.  Gone!  The ordeal over!  And Gyp said: 

“Let’s go up, darling.”

She felt as if they had both escaped a deadly peril—­not from anything those two could do to him or her, but from the cruel ache and jealousy of the past, which the sight of that man would have brought him.

Women, for their age, are surely older than men—­married women, at all events, than men who have not had that experience.  And all through those first weeks of their life together, there was a kind of wise watchfulness in Gyp.  He was only a boy in knowledge of life as she saw it, and though his character was so much more decided, active, and insistent than her own, she felt it lay with her to shape the course and avoid the shallows and sunken rocks.  The house they