for she was already in her bed; and it was a whole month before he brought himself to go there at an hour when he could see the child if he would.  The fact is, he was afraid.  What would the sight of this little creature stir in him?  When Betty, the nurse, brought her in to see the soldier gentleman with “the leather hand,” who had sent her those funny toys, she stood calmly staring with her large, deep-brown eyes.  Being seven, her little brown-velvet frock barely reached the knees of her thin, brown-stockinged legs planted one just in front of the other, as might be the legs of a small brown bird; the oval of her gravely wondering face was warm cream colour without red in it, except that of the lips, which were neither full nor thin, and had a little tuck, the tiniest possible dimple at one corner.  Her hair of warm dark brown had been specially brushed and tied with a narrow red ribbon back from her forehead, which was broad and rather low, and this added to her gravity.  Her eyebrows were thin and dark and perfectly arched; her little nose was perfectly straight, her little chin in perfect balance between round and point.  She stood and stared till Winton smiled.  Then the gravity of her face broke, her lips parted, her eyes seemed to fly a little.  And Winton’s heart turned over within him—­she was the very child of her that he had lost!  And he said, in a voice that seemed to him to tremble: 

“Well, Gyp?”

“Thank you for my toys; I like them.”

He held out his hand, and she gravely put her small hand into it.  A sense of solace, as if some one had slipped a finger in and smoothed his heart, came over Winton.  Gently, so as not to startle her, he raised her hand a little, bent, and kissed it.  It may have been from his instant recognition that here was one as sensitive as child could be, or the way many soldiers acquire from dealing with their men—­those simple, shrewd children—­or some deeper instinctive sense of ownership between them; whatever it was, from that moment, Gyp conceived for him a rushing admiration, one of those headlong affections children will sometimes take for the most unlikely persons.

He used to go there at an hour when he knew the squire would be asleep, between two and five.  After he had been with Gyp, walking in the park, riding with her in the Row, or on wet days sitting in her lonely nursery telling stories, while stout Betty looked on half hypnotized, a rather queer and doubting look on her comfortable face—­after such hours, he found it difficult to go to the squire’s study and sit opposite him, smoking.  Those interviews reminded him too much of past days, when he had kept such desperate check on himself—­too much of the old inward chafing against the other man’s legal ownership—­too much of the debt owing.  But Winton was triple-proofed against betrayal of feeling.  The squire welcomed him eagerly, saw nothing, felt nothing, was grateful for his goodness