he had taken this girl’s infatuation for his pleasure and then thrown her away.  She seemed to see him discarding that clinging, dove-fair girl, for cloying his senses and getting on his nerves, discarding her with caustic words, to abide alone the consequences of her infatuation.  She put her hand timidly on that shaking shoulder, and stroked it.  For a moment the sobbing stopped, and the girl said brokenly: 

“Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, I do love him so!” At those naive words, a painful wish to laugh seized on Gyp, making her shiver from head to foot.  Daphne Wing saw it, and went on:  “I know—­I know—­it’s awful; but I do—­and now he—­he—­” Her quiet but really dreadful sobbing broke out again.  And again Gyp began stroking and stroking her shoulder.  “And I have been so awful to you!  Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, do forgive me, please!”

All Gyp could find to answer, was: 

“Yes, yes; that’s nothing!  Don’t cry—­don’t cry!”

Very slowly the sobbing died away, till it was just a long shivering, but still the girl held her hands over her face and her face down.  Gyp felt paralyzed.  The unhappy girl, the red and green room, the smell of mutton—­creeping!

At last, a little of that white face showed; the lips, no longer craving for sugar-plums, murmured: 

“It’s you he—­he—­really loves all the time.  And you don’t love him—­that’s what’s so funny—­and—­and—­I can’t understand it.  Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, if I could see him—­just see him!  He told me never to come again; and I haven’t dared.  I haven’t seen him for three weeks—­not since I told him about it.  What shall I do?  What shall I do?”

His being her own husband seemed as nothing to Gyp at that moment.  She felt such pity and yet such violent revolt that any girl should want to crawl back to a man who had spurned her.  Unconsciously, she had drawn herself up and pressed her lips together.  The girl, who followed every movement, said piteously: 

“I don’t seem to have any pride.  I don’t mind what he does to me, or what he says, if only I can see him.”

Gyp’s revolt yielded to her pity.  She said: 

“How long before?”

“Three months.”

Three months—­and in this state of misery!

“I think I shall do something desperate.  Now that I can’t dance, and they know, it’s too awful!  If I could see him, I wouldn’t mind anything.  But I know—­I know he’ll never want me again.  Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, I wish I was dead!  I do!”

A heavy sigh escaped Gyp, and, bending suddenly, she kissed the girl’s forehead.  Still that scent of orange blossom about her skin or hair, as when she asked whether she ought to love or not; as when she came, moth-like, from the tree-shade into the moonlight, spun, and fluttered, with her shadow spinning and fluttering before her.  Gyp turned away, feeling that she must relieve the strain. and pointing to the bowl, said: