Suddenly she thought:  ‘Suppose I had loved him?’ and laughed.  The handkerchief dropped to her lap, and she looked at it with wonder—­ it was blood-stained.  She drew back in the chair, away from the scorching of the fire, and sat quite still, a smile on her lips.  That girl’s eyes, like a little adoring dog’s—­that girl, who had fawned on her so!  She had got her “distinguished man”!  She sprang up and looked at herself in the glass; shuddered, turned her back on herself, and sat down again.  In her own house!  Why not here—­ in this room?  Why not before her eyes?  Not yet a year married!  It was almost funny—­almost funny!  And she had her first calm thought:  ‘I am free.’

But it did not seem to mean anything, had no value to a spirit so bitterly stricken in its pride.  She moved her chair closer to the fire again.  Why had she not tapped on the window?  To have seen that girl’s face ashy with fright!  To have seen him—­caught—­ caught in the room she had made beautiful for him, the room where she had played for him so many hours, the room that was part of the house that she paid for!  How long had they used it for their meetings—­sneaking in by that door from the back lane?  Perhaps even before she went away—­to bear his child!  And there began in her a struggle between mother instinct and her sense of outrage—­a spiritual tug-of-war so deep that it was dumb, unconscious—­to decide whether her baby would be all hers, or would have slipped away from her heart, and be a thing almost abhorrent.

She huddled nearer the fire, feeling cold and physically sick.  And suddenly the thought came to her:  ’If I don’t let the servants know I’m here, they might go out and see what I saw!’ Had she shut the drawing-room window when she returned so blindly?  Perhaps already—!  In a fever, she rang the bell, and unlocked the door.  The maid came up.

“Please shut the drawing-room, window, Ellen; and tell Betty I’m afraid I got a little chill travelling.  I’m going to bed.  Ask her if she can manage with baby.”  And she looked straight into the girl’s face.  It wore an expression of concern, even of commiseration, but not that fluttered look which must have been there if she had known.

“Yes, m’m; I’ll get you a hot-water bottle, m’m.  Would you like a hot bath and a cup of hot tea at once?”

Gyp nodded.  Anything—­anything!  And when the maid was gone, she thought mechanically:  ’A cup of hot tea!  How quaint!  What should it be but hot?’

The maid came back with the tea; she was an affectionate girl, full of that admiring love servants and dogs always felt for Gyp, imbued, too, with the instinctive partisanship which stores itself one way or the other in the hearts of those who live in houses where the atmosphere lacks unity.  To her mind, the mistress was much too good for him—­a foreigner—­and such ’abits!  Manners—­he hadn’t any!  And no good would come of it.  Not if you took her opinion!