While Gyp was putting on hat and furs, she thought:  “I shan’t take a bag; I can always make shift at Bury Street if—­” She did not finish the thought, but the blood came up in her cheeks.  “Take care of Ossy, darling!” She ran down, caught up the letter, and hastened away to the station.  In the train, her cheeks still burned.  Might not this first visit to his chambers be like her old first visit to the little house in Chelsea?  She took the letter out.  How she hated that large, scrawly writing for all the thoughts and fears it had given her these past months!  If that girl knew how much anxiety and suffering she had caused, would she stop writing, stop seeing him?  And Gyp tried to conjure up her face, that face seen only for a minute, and the sound of that clipped, clear voice but once heard—­the face and voice of one accustomed to have her own way.  No!  It would only make her go on all the more.  Fair game, against a woman with no claim—­but that of love.  Thank heaven she had not taken him away from any woman—­unless—­that girl perhaps thought she had!  Ah!  Why, in all these years, had she never got to know his secrets, so that she might fight against what threatened her?  But would she have fought?  To fight for love was degrading, horrible!  And yet—­if one did not?  She got up and stood at the window of her empty carriage.  There was the river—­and there—­yes, the very backwater where he had begged her to come to him for good.  It looked so different, bare and shorn, under the light grey sky; the willows were all polled, the reeds cut down.  And a line from one of his favourite sonnets came into her mind: 

     “Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang.”

Ah, well!  Time enough to face things when they came.  She would only think of seeing him!  And she put the letter back to burn what hole it liked in the pocket of her fur coat.

The train was late; it was past five, already growing dark, when she reached Paddington and took a cab to the Temple.  Strange to be going there for the first time—­not even to know exactly where Harcourt Buildings were.  At Temple Lane, she stopped the cab and walked down that narrow, ill-lighted, busy channel into the heart of the Great Law.

“Up those stone steps, miss; along the railin’, second doorway.”  Gyp came to the second doorway and in the doubtful light scrutinized the names.  “Summerhay—­second floor.”  She began to climb the stairs.  Her heart beat fast.  What would he say?  How greet her?  Was it not absurd, dangerous, to have come?  He would be having a consultation perhaps.  There would be a clerk or someone to beard, and what name could she give?  On the first floor she paused, took out a blank card, and pencilled on it: 

     “Can I see you a minute?—­G.”