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When, at her words, Summerhay went out of the room, Gyp’s heart sank.  All the morning she had tried so hard to keep back her despairing jealousy, and now at the first reminder had broken down again.  It was beyond her strength!  To live day after day knowing that he, up in London, was either seeing that girl or painfully abstaining from seeing her!  And then, when he returned, to be to him just what she had been, to show nothing—­would it ever be possible?  Hardest to bear was what seemed to her the falsity of his words, maintaining that he still really loved her.  If he did, how could he hesitate one second?  Would not the very thought of the girl be abhorrent to him?  He would have shown that, not merely said it among other wild things.  Words were no use when they contradicted action.  She, who loved with every bit of her, could not grasp that a man can really love and want one woman and yet, at the same time, be attracted by another.

That sudden fearful impulse of the morning to make away with herself and end it for them both recurred so vaguely that it hardly counted in her struggles; the conflict centred now round the question whether life would be less utterly miserable if she withdrew from him and went back to Mildenham.  Life without him?  That was impossible!  Life with him?  Just as impossible, it seemed!  There comes a point of mental anguish when the alternatives between which one swings, equally hopeless, become each so monstrous that the mind does not really work at all, but rushes helplessly from one to the other, no longer trying to decide, waiting on fate.  So in Gyp that Sunday afternoon, doing little things all the time—­mending a hole in one of his gloves, brushing and applying ointment to old Ossy, sorting bills and letters.

At five o’clock, knowing little Gyp must soon be back from her walk, and feeling unable to take part in gaiety, she went up and put on her hat.  She turned from contemplation of her face with disgust.  Since it was no longer the only face for him, what was the use of beauty?  She slipped out by the side gate and went down toward the river.  The lull was over; the south-west wind had begun sighing through the trees again, and gorgeous clouds were piled up from the horizon into the pale blue.  She stood by the river watching its grey stream, edged by a scum of torn-off twigs and floating leaves, watched the wind shivering through the spoiled plume-branches of the willows.  And, standing there, she had a sudden longing for her father; he alone could help her—­just a little—­by his quietness, and his love, by his mere presence.