To this very room he had come back after hearing she was dead; this very room which he had refurnished to her taste, so that even now, with its satinwood chairs, little dainty Jacobean bureau, shaded old brass candelabra, divan, it still had an air exotic to bachelordom.  There, on the table, had been a letter recalling him to his regiment, ordered on active service.  If he had realized what he would go through before he had the chance of trying to lose his life out there, he would undoubtedly have taken that life, sitting in this very chair before the fire—­the chair sacred to her and memory.  He had not the luck he wished for in that little war—­men who don’t care whether they live or die seldom have.  He secured nothing but distinction.  When it was over, he went on, with a few more lines in his face, a few more wrinkles in his heart, soldiering, shooting tigers, pig-sticking, playing polo, riding to hounds harder than ever; giving nothing away to the world; winning steadily the curious, uneasy admiration that men feel for those who combine reckless daring with an ice-cool manner.  Since he was less of a talker even than most of his kind, and had never in his life talked of women, he did not gain the reputation of a woman-hater, though he so manifestly avoided them.  After six years’ service in India and Egypt, he lost his right hand in a charge against dervishes, and had, perforce, to retire, with the rank of major, aged thirty-four.  For a long time he had hated the very thought of the child—­his child, in giving birth to whom the woman he loved had died.  Then came a curious change of feeling; and for three years before his return to England, he had been in the habit of sending home odds and ends picked up in the bazaars, to serve as toys.  In return, he had received, twice annually at least, a letter from the man who thought himself Gyp’s father.  These letters he read and answered.  The squire was likable, and had been fond of her; and though never once had it seemed possible to Winton to have acted otherwise than he did, he had all the time preserved a just and formal sense of the wrong he had done this man.  He did not experience remorse, but he had always an irksome feeling as of a debt unpaid, mitigated by knowledge that no one had ever suspected, and discounted by memory of the awful torture he had endured to make sure against suspicion.

When, plus distinction and minus his hand, he was at last back in England, the squire had come to see him.  The poor man was failing fast from Bright’s disease.  Winton entered again that house in Mount Street with an emotion, to stifle which required more courage than any cavalry charge.  But one whose heart, as he would have put it, is “in the right place” does not indulge the quaverings of his nerves, and he faced those rooms where he had last seen her, faced that lonely little dinner with her husband, without sign of feeling.  He did not see little Ghita, or Gyp, as she had nicknamed herself,