No excuse!  Yet, in one month from that night, Winton and she were lovers, not only in thought but in deed.  A thing so utterly beyond “good form” and his sense of what was honourable and becoming in an officer and gentleman that it was simply never a question of weighing pro and con, the cons had it so completely.  And yet from that first evening, he was hers, she his.  For each of them the one thought was how to be with the other.  If so—­why did they not at least go off together?  Not for want of his beseeching.  And no doubt, if she had survived Gyp’s birth, they would have gone.  But to face the prospect of ruining two men, as it looked to her, had till then been too much for that soft-hearted creature.  Death stilled her struggle before it was decided.  There are women in whom utter devotion can still go hand in hand with a doubting soul.  Such are generally the most fascinating; for the power of hard and prompt decision robs women of mystery, of the subtle atmosphere of change and chance.  Though she had but one part in four of foreign blood, she was not at all English.  But Winton was English to his back-bone, English in his sense of form, and in that curious streak of whole-hearted desperation that will break form to smithereens in one department and leave it untouched in every other of its owner’s life.  To have called Winton a “crank” would never have occurred to any one—­his hair was always perfectly parted; his boots glowed; he was hard and reticent, accepting and observing every canon of well-bred existence.  Yet, in that, his one infatuation, he was as lost to the world and its opinion as the longest-haired lentil-eater of us all.  Though at any moment during that one year of their love he would have risked his life and sacrificed his career for a whole day in her company, he never, by word or look, compromised her.  He had carried his punctilious observance of her “honour” to a point more bitter than death, consenting, even, to her covering up the tracks of their child’s coming.  Paying that gambler’s debt was by far the bravest deed of his life, and even now its memory festered.

To this very room he had come back after hearing she was dead; this very room which he had refurnished to her taste, so that even now, with its satinwood chairs, little dainty Jacobean bureau, shaded old brass candelabra, divan, it still had an air exotic to bachelordom.  There, on the table, had been a letter recalling him to his regiment, ordered on active service.  If he had realized what he would go through before he had the chance of trying to lose his life out there, he would undoubtedly have taken that life, sitting in this very chair before the fire—­the chair sacred to her and memory.  He had not the luck he wished for in that little war—­ men who don’t care whether they live or die seldom have.  He secured nothing but distinction.  When it was over, he went on, with a few more lines in his face, a few more wrinkles in his heart, soldiering,