Gyp could detect Fiorsen subtly mimicking that drawl; and her ears began to burn.  The puppies afforded a diversion—­their points, noses, boldness, and food, held the danger in abeyance for some minutes.  Then the mimicry began again.  When Aunt Rosamund had taken a somewhat sudden leave, Gyp stood at the window of her drawing-room with the mask off her face.  Fiorsen came up, put his arm round her from behind, and said with a fierce sigh: 

“Are they coming often—­these excellent people?”

Gyp drew back from him against the wall.

“If you love me, why do you try to hurt the people who love me too?”

“Because I am jealous.  I am jealous even of those puppies.”

“And shall you try to hurt them?”

“If I see them too much near you, perhaps I shall.”

“Do you think I can be happy if you hurt things because they love me?”

He sat down and drew her on to his knee.  She did not resist, but made not the faintest return to his caresses.  The first time—­the very first friend to come into her own new home!  It was too much!

Fiorsen said hoarsely: 

“You do not love me.  If you loved me, I should feel it through your lips.  I should see it in your eyes.  Oh, love me, Gyp!  You shall!”

But to say to Love:  “Stand and deliver!” was not the way to touch Gyp.  It seemed to her mere ill-bred stupidity.  She froze against him in soul, all the more that she yielded her body.  When a woman refuses nothing to one whom she does not really love, shadows are already falling on the bride-house.  And Fiorsen knew it; but his self-control about equalled that of the two puppies.

Yet, on the whole, these first weeks in her new home were happy, too busy to allow much room for doubting or regret.  Several important concerts were fixed for May.  She looked forward to these with intense eagerness, and pushed everything that interfered with preparation into the background.  As though to make up for that instinctive recoil from giving her heart, of which she was always subconscious, she gave him all her activities, without calculation or reserve.  She was ready to play for him all day and every day, just as from the first she had held herself at the disposal of his passion.  To fail him in these ways would have tarnished her opinion of herself.  But she had some free hours in the morning, for he had the habit of lying in bed till eleven, and was never ready for practise before twelve.  In those early hours she got through her orders and her shopping—­that pursuit which to so many women is the only real “sport”—­a chase of the ideal; a pitting of one’s taste and knowledge against that of the world at large; a secret passion, even in the beautiful, for making oneself and one’s house more beautiful.  Gyp never went shopping without that faint thrill running up and down her nerves.  She hated to be touched by strange fingers, but not even that stopped her pleasure in turning and turning before long mirrors, while the saleswoman or man, with admiration at first crocodilic and then genuine, ran the tips of fingers over those curves, smoothing and pinning, and uttering the word, “moddam.”