After this, Gyp was daily more and more in contact with high bohemia, that curious composite section of society which embraces the neck of music, poetry, and the drama.  She was a success, but secretly she felt that she did not belong to it, nor, in truth, did Fiorsen, who was much too genuine a bohemian, and artist, and mocked at the Gallants and even the Roseks of this life, as he mocked at Winton, Aunt Rosamund, and their world.  Life with him had certainly one effect on Gyp; it made her feel less and less a part of that old orthodox, well-bred world which she had known before she married him; but to which she had confessed to Winton she had never felt that she belonged, since she knew the secret of her birth.  She was, in truth, much too impressionable, too avid of beauty, and perhaps too naturally critical to accept the dictates of their fact-and-form-governed routine; only, of her own accord, she would never have had initiative enough to step out of its circle.  Loosened from those roots, unable to attach herself to this new soil, and not spiritually leagued with her husband, she was more and more lonely.  Her only truly happy hours were those spent with Winton or at her piano or with her puppies.  She was always wondering at what she had done, longing to find the deep, the sufficient reason for having done it.  But the more she sought and longed, the deeper grew her bewilderment, her feeling of being in a cage.  Of late, too, another and more definite uneasiness had come to her.

She spent much time in her garden, where the blossoms had all dropped, lilac was over, acacias coming into bloom, and blackbirds silent.

Winton, who, by careful experiment, had found that from half-past three to six there was little or no chance of stumbling across his son-in-law, came in nearly every day for tea and a quiet cigar on the lawn.  He was sitting there with Gyp one afternoon, when Betty, who usurped the functions of parlour-maid whenever the whim moved her, brought out a card on which were printed the words, “Miss Daphne Wing.”

“Bring her out, please, Betty dear, and some fresh tea, and buttered toast—­plenty of buttered toast; yes, and the chocolates, and any other sweets there are, Betty darling.”

Betty, with that expression which always came over her when she was called “darling,” withdrew across the grass, and Gyp said to her father: 

“It’s the little dancer I told you of, Dad.  Now you’ll see something perfect.  Only, she’ll be dressed.  It’s a pity.”

She was.  The occasion had evidently exercised her spirit.  In warm ivory, shrouded by leaf-green chiffon, with a girdle of tiny artificial leaves, and a lightly covered head encircled by other green leaves, she was somewhat like a nymph peering from a bower.  If rather too arresting, it was charming, and, after all, no frock could quite disguise the beauty of her figure.  She was evidently nervous.