“Don’t be angry with me for being such a grandmother.

“Au revoir.

“Your very good cousin,

“Diana Leyton.”

He crammed the letter into his pocket, and sat there, appalled.  It must have lain two days under that bust!  Had Gyp seen it?  He looked at the bronze face; and the philosopher looked back from the hollows of his eyes, as if to say:  “What do you know of the human heart, my boy—­your own, your mistress’s, that girl’s, or anyone’s?  A pretty dance the heart will lead you yet!  Put it in a packet, tie it round with string, seal it up, drop it in a drawer, lock the drawer!  And to-morrow it will be out and skipping on its wrappings.  Ho!  Ho!” And Summerhay thought:  ’You old goat.  You never had one!’ In the room above, Gyp would still be standing as he had left her, putting the last touch to her hair—­a man would be a scoundrel who, even in thought, could—­“Hallo!” the eyes of the bust seemed to say.  “Pity!  That’s queer, isn’t it?  Why not pity that red-haired girl, with the skin so white that it burns you, and the eyes so brown that they burn you—­don’t they?” Old Satan!  Gyp had his heart; no one in the world would ever take it from her!

And in the chair where she had sat last night conjuring up memories, he too now conjured.  How he had loved her, did love her!  She would always be what she was and had been to him.  And the sage’s mouth seemed to twist before him with the words:  “Quite so, my dear!  But the heart’s very funny—­very—­capacious!” A tiny sound made him turn.

Little Gyp was standing in the doorway.

“Hallo!” he said.

“Hallo, Baryn!” She came flying to him, and he caught her up so that she stood on his knees with the sunlight shining on her fluffed out hair.

“Well, Gipsy!  Who’s getting a tall girl?”

“I’m goin’ to ride.”

“Ho, ho!”

“Baryn, let’s do Humpty-Dumpty!”

“All right; come on!” He rose and carried her upstairs.

Gyp was still doing one of those hundred things which occupy women for a quarter of an hour after they are “quite ready,” and at little Gyp’s shout of, “Humpty!” she suspended her needle to watch the sacred rite.

Summerhay had seated himself on the foot-rail of the bed, rounding his arms, sinking his neck, blowing out his cheeks to simulate an egg; then, with an unexpectedness that even little Gyp could always see through, he rolled backward on to the bed.

And she, simulating “all the king’s horses,” tried in vain to put him up again.  This immemorial game, watched by Gyp a hundred times, had to-day a special preciousness.  If he could be so ridiculously young, what became of her doubts?  Looking at his face pulled this way and that, lazily imperturbable under the pommelings of those small fingers, she thought:  ‘And that girl dared to say he was wasting himself!’ For in the night conviction