“When are you going to see him next?”

Daphne Wing grew very pink.

“I don’t know.  He might be coming in to lunch.  You see, it’s not as if he were a stranger, is it?” Casting up her eyes a little, she added:  “He won’t even let me speak your name; it makes him mad.  That’s why I’m sure he still loves you; only, his love is so funny.”  And, seizing Gyp’s hand:  “I shall never forget how good you were to me.  I do hope you—­you love somebody else.”  Gyp pressed those damp, clinging fingers, and Daphne Wing hurried on:  “I’m sure your baby’s a darling.  How you must be suffering!  You look quite pale.  But it isn’t any good suffering.  I learned that.”

Her eyes lighted on the table, and a faint ruefulness came into them, as if she were going to ask Gyp to eat the oysters.

Gyp bent forward and put her lips to the girl’s forehead.

“Good-bye.  My baby would thank you if she knew.”

And she turned to go.  She heard a sob.  Daphne Wing was crying; then, before Gyp could speak, she struck herself on the throat, and said, in a strangled voice: 

“Tha—­that’s idiotic!  I—­I haven’t cried since—­since, you know.  I—­I’m perfect mistress of myself; only, I—­only—­I suppose you reminded me—­I never cry!”

Those words and the sound of a hiccough accompanied Gyp down the alley to her cab.

When she got back to Bury Street, she found Betty sitting in the hall with her bonnet on.  She had not been sent for, nor had any reply come from Newmarket.  Gyp could not eat, could settle to nothing.  She went up to her bedroom to get away from the servants’ eyes, and went on mechanically with a frock of little Gyp’s she had begun on the fatal morning Fiorsen had come back.  Every other minute she stopped to listen to sounds that never meant anything, went a hundred times to the window to look at nothing.  Betty, too, had come upstairs, and was in the nursery opposite; Gyp could hear her moving about restlessly among her household gods.  Presently, those sounds ceased, and, peering into the room, she saw the stout woman still in her bonnet, sitting on a trunk, with her back turned, uttering heavy sighs.  Gyp stole back into her own room with a sick, trembling sensation.  If—­if her baby really could not be recovered except by that sacrifice!  If that cruel letter were the last word, and she forced to decide between them!  Which would she give up?  Which follow—­her lover or her child?

She went to the window for air—­the pain about her heart was dreadful.  And, leaning there against the shutter, she felt quite dizzy from the violence of a struggle that refused coherent thought or feeling, and was just a dumb pull of instincts, both so terribly strong—­how terribly strong she had not till then perceived.