The moonlight was shining full on the old bureau and a vase of tulips standing there, giving those flowers colour that was not colour, and an unnamed look, as if they came from a world which no human enters.  It glinted on a bronze bust of old Voltaire, which she had bought him for a Christmas present, so that the great writer seemed to be smiling from the hollows of his eyes.  Gyp turned the bust a little, to catch the light on its far cheek; a letter was disclosed between it and the oak.  She drew it out thinking:  ‘Bless him!  He uses everything for paper-weights’; and, in the strange light, its first words caught her eyes: 

“Dear Bryan,

“But I say—­you are wasting yourself—­”

She laid it down, methodically pushing it back under the bust.  Perhaps he had put it there on purpose!  She got up and went to the window, to check the temptation to read the rest of that letter and see from whom it was.  No!  She did not admit that she was tempted.  One did not read letters.  Then the full import of those few words struck into her:  “Dear Bryan.  But I say—­you are wasting yourself.”  A letter in a chain of correspondence, then!  A woman’s hand; but not his mother’s, nor his sisters’—­she knew their writings.  Who had dared to say he was wasting himself?  A letter in a chain of letters!  An intimate correspondent, whose name she did not know, because—­he had not told her!  Wasting himself—­on what?—­on his life with her down here?  And was he?  Had she herself not said that very night that he had lost his laugh?  She began searching her memory.  Yes, last Christmas vacation—­that clear, cold, wonderful fortnight in Florence, he had been full of fun.  It was May now.  Was there no memory since—­of his old infectious gaiety?  She could not think of any.  “But I say—­you are wasting yourself.”  A sudden hatred flared up in her against the unknown woman who had said that thing—­and fever, running through her veins, made her ears burn.  She longed to snatch forth and tear to pieces the letter, with its guardianship of which that bust seemed mocking her; and she turned away with the thought:  ‘I’ll go and meet him; I can’t wait here.’

Throwing on a cloak she walked out into the moonlit garden, and went slowly down the whitened road toward the station.  A magical, dewless night!  The moonbeams had stolen in to the beech clump, frosting the boles and boughs, casting a fine ghostly grey over the shadow-patterned beech-mast.  Gyp took the short cut through it.  Not a leaf moved in there, no living thing stirred; so might an earth be where only trees inhabited!  She thought:  ’I’ll bring him back through here.’  And she waited at the far corner of the clump, where he must pass, some little distance from the station.  She never gave people unnecessary food for gossip—­any slighting of her irritated him, she was careful to spare him that.  The train came in; a car went whizzing by, a cyclist, then the first foot-passenger, at a great pace, breaking into a run.  She saw that it was he, and, calling out his name, ran back into the shadow of the trees.  He stopped dead in his tracks, then came rushing after her.  That pursuit did not last long, and, in his arms, Gyp said: