“I want the puppies, please.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Over the garden, the day brooded in the first-gathered warmth of summer.  Mid-June of a fine year.  The air was drowsy with hum and scent.

And Gyp, sitting in the shade, while the puppies rolled and snapped, searched her little world for comfort and some sense of safety, and could not find it; as if there were all round her a hot heavy fog in which things lurked, and where she kept erect only by pride and the will not to cry out that she was struggling and afraid.

Fiorsen, leaving his house that morning, had walked till he saw a taxi-cab.  Leaning back therein, with hat thrown off, he caused himself to be driven rapidly, at random.  This was one of his habits when his mind was not at ease—­an expensive idiosyncrasy, ill-afforded by a pocket that had holes.  The swift motion and titillation by the perpetual close shaving of other vehicles were sedative to him.  He needed sedatives this morning.  To wake in his own bed without the least remembering how he had got there was no more new to him than to many another man of twenty-eight, but it was new since his marriage.  If he had remembered even less he would have been more at ease.  But he could just recollect standing in the dark drawing-room, seeing and touching a ghostly Gyp quite close to him.  And, somehow, he was afraid.  And when he was afraid—­like most people—­he was at his worst.

If she had been like all the other women in whose company he had eaten passion-fruit, he would not have felt this carking humiliation.  If she had been like them, at the pace he had been going since he obtained possession of her, he would already have “finished,” as Rosek had said.  And he knew well enough that he had not “finished.”  He might get drunk, might be loose-ended in every way, but Gyp was hooked into his senses, and, for all that he could not get near her, into his spirit.  Her very passivity was her strength, the secret of her magnetism.  In her, he felt some of that mysterious sentiency of nature, which, even in yielding to man’s fevers, lies apart with a faint smile—­the uncapturable smile of the woods and fields by day or night, that makes one ache with longing.  He felt in her some of the unfathomable, soft, vibrating indifference of the flowers and trees and streams, of the rocks, of birdsongs, and the eternal hum, under sunshine or star-shine.  Her dark, half-smiling eyes enticed him, inspired an unquenchable thirst.  And his was one of those natures which, encountering spiritual difficulty, at once jib off, seek anodynes, try to bandage wounded egoism with excess—­a spoiled child, with the desperations and the inherent pathos, the something repulsive and the something lovable that belong to all such.  Having wished for this moon, and got her, he now did not know what to do with her, kept taking great bites at her, with a feeling all the time of getting further and further