Then she thought of her father—­still faithful to a memory—­and felt ashamed.  Some men loved on—­yes—­even beyond death!  But, sometimes, she would think:  ’Am I a candle-flame again?  Is he just going to burn himself?  What real good can I be to him—­I, without freedom, and with my baby, who will grow up?’ Yet all these thoughts were, in a way, unreal.  The struggle was in herself, so deep that she could hardly understand it; as might be an effort to subdue the instinctive dread of a precipice.  And she would feel a kind of resentment against all the happy life round her these summer days—­the sea-birds, the sunlight, and the waves; the white sails far out; the calm sun-steeped pine-trees; her baby, tumbling and smiling and softly twittering; and Betty and the other servants—­all this life that seemed so simple and untortured.

To the one post each day she looked forward terribly.  And yet his letters, which began like hers:  “My dear friend,” might have been read by anyone—­almost.  She spent a long time over her answers.  She was not sleeping well; and, lying awake, she could see his face very distinct before her closed eyes—­its teasing, lazy smile, its sudden intent gravity.  Once she had a dream of him, rushing past her down into the sea.  She called, but, without turning his head, he swam out further, further, till she lost sight of him, and woke up suddenly with a pain in her heart.  “If you can’t love me, I’ve got to break away!” His face, his flung-back head reminded her too sharply of those words.  Now that he was away from her, would he not feel that it was best to break, and forget her?  Up there, he would meet girls untouched by life—­not like herself.  He had everything before him; could he possibly go on wanting one who had nothing before her?  Some blue-eyed girl with auburn hair—­that type so superior to her own—­would sweep, perhaps had already swept him, away from her!  What then?  No worse than it used to be?  Ah, so much worse that she dared not think of it!

Then, for five days, no letter came.  And, with each blank morning, the ache in her grew—­a sharp, definite ache of longing and jealousy, utterly unlike the mere feeling of outraged pride when she had surprised Fiorsen and Daphne Wing in the music-room—­a hundred years ago, it seemed.  When on the fifth day the postman left nothing but a bill for little Gyp’s shoes, and a note from Aunt Rosamund at Harrogate, where she had gone with Winton for the annual cure, Gyp’s heart sank to the depths.  Was this the end?  And, with a blind, numb feeling, she wandered out into the wood, where the fall of the pine-needles, season after season, had made of the ground one soft, dark, dust-coloured bed, on which the sunlight traced the pattern of the pine boughs, and ants rummaged about their great heaped dwellings.