II

In spite of his victory over all human rivals in the heart of Gyp, Winton had a rival whose strength he fully realized perhaps for the first time now that she was gone, and he, before the fire, was brooding over her departure and the past.  Not likely that one of his decisive type, whose life had so long been bound up with swords and horses, would grasp what music might mean to a little girl.  Such ones, he knew, required to be taught scales, and “In a Cottage near a Wood” with other melodies.  He took care not to go within sound of them, so that he had no conception of the avidity with which Gyp had mopped up all, and more than all, her governess could teach her.  He was blind to the rapture with which she listened to any stray music that came its way to Mildenham—­to carols in the Christmas dark, to certain hymns, and one special “Nunc Dimittis” in the village church, attended with a hopeless regularity; to the horn of the hunter far out in the quivering, dripping coverts; even to Markey’s whistling, which was full and strangely sweet.

He could share her love of dogs and horses, take an anxious interest in her way of catching bumblebees in the hollow of her hand and putting them to her small, delicate ears to hear them buzz, sympathize with her continual ravages among the flowerbeds, in the old-fashioned garden, full of lilacs and laburnums in spring, pinks, roses, cornflowers in summer, dahlias and sunflowers in autumn, and always a little neglected and overgrown, a little squeezed in, and elbowed by the more important surrounding paddocks.  He could sympathize with her attempts to draw his attention to the song of birds; but it was simply not in him to understand how she loved and craved for music.  She was a cloudy little creature, up and down in mood—­rather like a brown lady spaniel that she had, now gay as a butterfly, now brooding as night.  Any touch of harshness she took to heart fearfully.  She was the strangest compound of pride and sell-disparagement; the qualities seemed mixed in her so deeply that neither she nor any one knew of which her cloudy fits were the result.  Being so sensitive, she “fancied” things terribly.  Things that others did to her, and thought nothing of, often seemed to her conclusive evidence that she was not loved by anybody, which was dreadfully unjust, because she wanted to love everyone—­nearly.  Then suddenly she would feel:  “If they don’t love me, I don’t care.  I don’t want anything of anybody!” Presently, all would blow away just like a cloud, and she would love and be gay, until something fresh, perhaps not at all meant to hurt her, would again hurt her horribly.  In reality, the whole household loved and admired her.  But she was one of those delicate-treading beings, born with a skin too few, who—­and especially in childhood—­suffer from themselves in a world born with a skin too many.