“Really is her father!” The words meant too much to be grasped this evening of full sensations.  They left a little bruise somewhere, but softened and anointed, just a sense of confusion at the back of her mind.  And very soon came that other sensation, so disillusioning, that all else was crowded out.  It was after a dance—­a splendid dance with a good-looking man quite twice her age.  They were sitting behind some palms, he murmuring in his mellow, flown voice admiration for her dress, when suddenly he bent his flushed face and kissed her bare arm above the elbow.  If he had hit her he could not have astonished or hurt her more.  It seemed to her innocence that he would never have done such a thing if she had not said something dreadful to encourage him.  Without a word she got up, gazed at him a moment with eyes dark from pain, shivered, and slipped away.  She went straight to Winton.  From her face, all closed up, tightened lips, and the familiar little droop at their corners, he knew something dire had happened, and his eyes boded ill for the person who had hurt her; but she would say nothing except that she was tired and wanted to go home.  And so, with the little faithful governess, who, having been silent perforce nearly all the evening, was now full of conversation, they drove out into the frosty night.  Winton sat beside the chauffeur, smoking viciously, his fur collar turned up over his ears, his eyes stabbing the darkness, under his round, low-drawn fur cap.  Who had dared upset his darling?  And, within the car, the little governess chattered softly, and Gyp, shrouded in lace, in her dark corner sat silent, seeing nothing but the vision of that insult.  Sad end to a lovely night!

She lay awake long hours in the darkness, while a sort of coherence was forming in her mind.  Those words:  “Really is her father!” and that man’s kissing of her bare arm were a sort of revelation of sex-mystery, hardening the consciousness that there was something at the back of her life.  A child so sensitive had not, of course, quite failed to feel the spiritual draughts around her; but instinctively she had recoiled from more definite perceptions.  The time before Winton came was all so faint—­Betty, toys, short glimpses of a kind, invalidish man called “Papa.”  As in that word there was no depth compared with the word “Dad” bestowed on Winton, so there had been no depth in her feelings towards the squire.  When a girl has no memory of her mother, how dark are many things!  None, except Betty, had ever talked of her mother.  There was nothing sacred in Gyp’s associations, no faiths to be broken by any knowledge that might come to her; isolated from other girls, she had little realisation even of the conventions.  Still, she suffered horribly, lying there in the dark—­from bewilderment, from thorns dragged over her skin, rather than from a stab in the heart.  The knowledge of something about her conspicuous,