“Is Miss—­Miss Daphne Wing at home?”

In that peculiar “I’ve given it up” voice of domestics in small households, the servant answered: 

“Yes; Miss Disey’s in.  D’you want to see ’er?  What nyme?”

Gyp produced her card.  The maid looked at it, at Gyp, and at two brown-painted doors, as much as to say, “Where will you have it?” Then, opening the first of them, she said: 

“Tyke a seat, please; I’ll fetch her.”

Gyp went in.  In the middle of what was clearly the dining-room, she tried to subdue the tremor of her limbs and a sense of nausea.  The table against which her hand rested was covered with red baize, no doubt to keep the stains of mutton from penetrating to the wood.  On the mahogany sideboard reposed a cruet-stand and a green dish of very red apples.  A bamboo-framed talc screen painted with white and yellow marguerites stood before a fireplace filled with pampas-grass dyed red.  The chairs were of red morocco, the curtains a brownish-red, the walls green, and on them hung a set of Landseer prints.  The peculiar sensation which red and green in juxtaposition produce on the sensitive was added to Gyp’s distress.  And, suddenly, her eyes lighted on a little deep-blue china bowl.  It stood on a black stand on the mantel-piece, with nothing in it.  To Gyp, in this room of red and green, with the smell of mutton creeping in, that bowl was like the crystallized whiff of another world.  Daphne Wing—­not Daisy Wagge—­had surely put it there!  And, somehow, it touched her—­emblem of stifled beauty, emblem of all that the girl had tried to pour out to her that August afternoon in her garden nearly a year ago.  Thin Eastern china, good and really beautiful!  A wonder they allowed it to pollute this room!

A sigh made her turn round.  With her back against the door and a white, scared face, the girl was standing.  Gyp thought:  ’She has suffered horribly.’  And, going impulsively up to her, she held out her hand.

Daphne Wing sighed out:  “Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen!” and, bending over that hand, kissed it.  Gyp saw that her new glove was wet.  Then the girl relapsed, her feet a little forward, her head a little forward, her back against the door.  Gyp, who knew why she stood thus, was swept again by those two emotions—­rage against men, and fellow feeling for one about to go through what she herself had just endured.

“It’s all right,” she said, gently; “only, what’s to be done?”

Daphne Wing put her hands up over her white face and sobbed.  She sobbed so quietly but so terribly deeply that Gyp herself had the utmost difficulty not to cry.  It was the sobbing of real despair by a creature bereft of hope and strength, above all, of love—­the sort of weeping which is drawn from desolate, suffering souls only by the touch of fellow feeling.  And, instead of making Gyp glad or satisfying her sense of justice, it filled her with more rage against her husband—­that