The usual route from the station to Bury Street was “up,” and the cab went by narrow by-streets, town lanes where the misery of the world is on show, where ill-looking men, draggled and over-driven women, and the jaunty ghosts of little children in gutters and on doorsteps proclaim, by every feature of their clay-coloured faces and every movement of their unfed bodies, the post-datement of the millennium; where the lean and smutted houses have a look of dissolution indefinitely put off, and there is no more trace of beauty than in a sewer.  Gyp, leaning forward, looked out, as one does after a long sea voyage; Winton felt her hand slip into his and squeeze it hard.

That evening after dinner—­in the room he had furnished for her mother, where the satinwood chairs, the little Jacobean bureau, the old brass candelabra were still much as they had been just on thirty years ago—­she said: 

“Dad, I’ve been thinking.  Would you mind if I could make a sort of home at Mildenham where poor children could come to stay and get good air and food?  There are such thousands of them.”

Strangely moved by this, the first wish he had heard her express since the tragedy, Winton took her hand, and, looking at it as if for answer to his question, said: 

“My dear, are, you strong enough?”

“Quite.  There’s nothing wrong with me now except here.”  She drew his hand to her and pressed it against her heart.  “What’s given, one can’t get back.  I can’t help it; I would if I could.  It’s been so dreadful for you.  I’m so sorry.”  Winton made an unintelligible sound, and she went on:  “If I had them to see after, I shouldn’t be able to think so much; the more I had to do the better.  Good for our gipsy-bird, too, to have them there.  I should like to begin it at once.”

Winton nodded.  Anything that she felt could do her good—­anything!

“Yes, yes,” he said; “I quite see—­you could use the two old cottages to start with, and we can easily run up anything you want.”

“Only let me do it all, won’t you?”

At that touch of her old self, Winton smiled.  She should do everything, pay for everything, bring a whole street of children down, if it would give her any comfort!

“Rosamund’ll help you find ’em,” he muttered.  “She’s first-rate at all that sort of thing.”  Then, looking at her fixedly, he added:  “Courage, my soul; it’ll all come back some day.”

Gyp forced herself to smile.  Watching her, he understood only too well the child’s saying:  “Mum lives away somewhere, I think.”

Suddenly, she said, very low: 

“And yet I wouldn’t have been without it.”

She was sitting, her hands clasped in her lap, two red spots high in her cheeks, her eyes shining strangely, the faint smile still on her lips.  And Winton, staring with narrowed eyes, thought:  ’Love!  Beyond measure—­beyond death—­it nearly kills.  But one wouldn’t have been without it.  Why?’