On other mornings, she would ride with Winton, who would come for her, leaving her again at her door after their outings.  One day, after a ride in Richmond Park, where the horse-chestnuts were just coming into flower, they had late breakfast on the veranda of a hotel before starting for home.  Some fruit-trees were still in blossom just below them, and the sunlight showering down from a blue sky brightened to silver the windings of the river, and to gold the budding leaves of the oak-trees.  Winton, smoking his after-breakfast cigar, stared down across the tops of those trees toward the river and the wooded fields beyond.  Stealing a glance at him, Gyp said very softly: 

“Did you ever ride with my mother, Dad?”

“Only once—­the very ride we’ve been to-day.  She was on a black mare; I had a chestnut—­” Yes, in that grove on the little hill, which they had ridden through that morning, he had dismounted and stood beside her.

Gyp stretched her hand across the table and laid it on his.

“Tell me about her, dear.  Was she beautiful?”

“Yes.”

“Dark?  Tall?”

“Very like you, Gyp.  A little—­a little”—­he did not know how to describe that difference—­“a little more foreign-looking perhaps.  One of her grandmothers was Italian, you know.”

“How did you come to love her?  Suddenly?”

“As suddenly as”—­he drew his hand away and laid it on the veranda rail—­“as that sun came on my hand.”

Gyp said quietly, as if to herself: 

“Yes; I don’t think I understand that—­yet.”

Winton drew breath through his teeth with a subdued hiss.

“Did she love you at first sight, too?”

He blew out a long puff of smoke.

“One easily believes what one wants to—­but I think she did.  She used to say so.”

“And how long?”

“Only a year.”

Gyp said very softly: 

“Poor darling Dad.”  And suddenly she added:  “I can’t bear to think I killed her—­I can’t bear it!”

Winton got up in the discomfort of these sudden confidences; a blackbird, startled by the movement, ceased his song.  Gyp said in a hard voice: 

“No; I don’t want to have any children.”

“Without that, I shouldn’t have had you, Gyp.”

“No; but I don’t want to have them.  And I don’t—­I don’t want to love like that.  I should be afraid.”

Winton looked at her for a long time without speaking, his brows drawn down, frowning, puzzled, as though over his own past.

“Love,” he said, “it catches you, and you’re gone.  When it comes, you welcome it, whether it’s to kill you or not.  Shall we start back, my child?”

When she got home, it was not quite noon.  She hurried over her bath and dressing, and ran out to the music-room.  Its walls had been hung with Willesden scrim gilded over; the curtains were silver-grey; there was a divan covered with silver-and-gold stuff, and a beaten brass fireplace.  It was a study in silver, and gold, save for two touches of fantasy—­a screen round the piano-head, covered with brilliantly painted peacocks’ tails, and a blue Persian vase, in which were flowers of various hues of red.