Winton said softly: 

“So those two got that pretty filly!  Well, she didn’t show much quality, when you come to think of it.  She’s still with our friend, according to your aunt.”

Gyp nodded.

“Yes; and I do hope she’s happy.”

“He isn’t, apparently.  Serves him right.”

Gyp shook her head.

“Oh no, Dad!”

“Well, one oughtn’t to wish any man worse than he’s likely to get.  But when I see people daring to look down their noses at you—­by Jove!  I get—­”

“Darling, what does that matter?”

Winton answered testily: 

“It matters very much to me—­the impudence of it!” His mouth relaxed in a grim little smile:  “Ah, well—­there’s not much to choose between us so far as condemning our neighbours goes.  ’Charity Stakes—­also ran, Charles Clare Winton, the Church, and Mrs. Grundy.’”

They opened out to each other more in those few days at Tunbridge Wells than they had for years.  Whether the process of bathing softened his crust, or the air that Mr. Wagge found “a bit—­er—­too irony, as you might say,” had upon Winton the opposite effect, he certainly relaxed that first duty of man, the concealment of his spirit, and disclosed his activities as he never had before—­how such and such a person had been set on his feet, so and so sent out to Canada, this man’s wife helped over her confinement, that man’s daughter started again after a slip.  And Gyp’s child-worship of him bloomed anew.

On the last afternoon of their stay, she strolled out with him through one of the long woods that stretched away behind their hotel.  Excited by the coming end of her self-inflicted penance, moved by the beauty among those sunlit trees, she found it difficult to talk.  But Winton, about to lose her, was quite loquacious.  Starting from the sinister change in the racing-world—­so plutocratic now, with the American seat, the increase of bookmaking owners, and other tragic occurrences—­he launched forth into a jeremiad on the condition of things in general.  Parliament, he thought, especially now that members were paid, had lost its self-respect; the towns had eaten up the country; hunting was threatened; the power and vulgarity of the press were appalling; women had lost their heads; and everybody seemed afraid of having any “breeding.”  By the time little Gyp was Gyp’s age, they would all be under the thumb of Watch Committees, live in Garden Cities, and have to account for every half-crown they spent, and every half-hour of their time; the horse, too, would be an extinct animal, brought out once a year at the lord-mayor’s show.  He hoped—­the deuce—­he might not be alive to see it.  And suddenly he added:  “What do you think happens after death, Gyp?”

They were sitting on one of those benches that crop up suddenly in the heart of nature.  All around them briars and bracken were just on the turn; and the hum of flies, the vague stir of leaves and life formed but a single sound.  Gyp, gazing into the wood, answered: