Then, with the utmost speed, she did her hair and dressed.  She was very cold and shivery, and put on her fur coat and cap.  She hunted out two jerseys for the baby, and a certain old camel’s-hair shawl.  She took a few little things she was fondest of and slipped them into her wrist-bag with her purse, put on her hat and a pair of gloves.  She did everything very swiftly, wondering, all the time, at her own power of knowing what to take.  When she was quite ready, she scribbled a note to Betty to follow with the dogs to Bury Street, and pushed it under the nursery door.  Then, wrapping the baby in the jerseys and shawl, she went downstairs.  The dawn had broken, and, from the long narrow window above the door with spikes of iron across it, grey light was striking into the hall.  Gyp passed Fiorsen’s sleeping figure safely, and, for one moment, stopped for breath.  He was lying with his back against the wall, his head in the hollow of an arm raised against a stair, and his face turned a little upward.  That face which, hundreds of times, had been so close to her own, and something about this crumpled body, about his tumbled hair, those cheek-bones, and the hollows beneath the pale lips just parted under the dirt-gold of his moustache—­something of lost divinity in all that inert figure—­clutched for a second at Gyp’s heart.  Only for a second.  It was over, this time!  No more—­never again!  And, turning very stealthily, she slipped her shoes on, undid the chain, opened the front door, took up her burden, closed the door softly behind her, and walked away.

Part III

I

Gyp was going up to town.  She sat in the corner of a first-class carriage, alone.  Her father had gone up by an earlier train, for the annual June dinner of his old regiment, and she had stayed to consult the doctor concerning “little Gyp,” aged nearly nineteen months, to whom teeth were making life a burden.

Her eyes wandered from window to window, obeying the faint excitement within her.  All the winter and spring, she had been at Mildenham, very quiet, riding much, and pursuing her music as best she could, seeing hardly anyone except her father; and this departure for a spell of London brought her the feeling that comes on an April day, when the sky is blue, with snow-white clouds, when in the fields the lambs are leaping, and the grass is warm for the first time, so that one would like to roll in it.  At Widrington, a porter entered, carrying a kit-bag, an overcoat, and some golf-clubs; and round the door a little group, such as may be seen at any English wayside station, clustered, filling the air with their clean, slightly drawling voices.  Gyp noted a tall woman whose blonde hair was going grey, a young girl with a fox-terrier on a lead, a young man with a Scotch terrier under his arm and his back to the carriage.  The girl was kissing the Scotch terrier’s head.