Was ever courtship more strange than that which followed?  It is said that the cat fascinates the bird it desires to eat; here the bird fascinated the cat, but the bird too was fascinated.  Gyp never lost the sense of having the whip-hand, always felt like one giving alms, or extending favour, yet had a feeling of being unable to get away, which seemed to come from the very strength of the spell she laid on him.  The magnetism with which she held him reacted on herself.  Thoroughly sceptical at first, she could not remain so.  He was too utterly morose and unhappy if she did not smile on him, too alive and excited and grateful if she did.  The change in his eyes from their ordinary restless, fierce, and furtive expression to humble adoration or wistful hunger when they looked at her could never have been simulated.  And she had no lack of chance to see that metamorphosis.  Wherever she went, there he was.  If to a concert, he would be a few paces from the door, waiting for her entrance.  If to a confectioner’s for tea, as likely as not he would come in.  Every afternoon he walked where she must pass, riding to the Neroberg.

Except in the gardens of the Kochbrunnen, when he would come up humbly and ask to sit with her five minutes, he never forced his company, or tried in any way to compromise her.  Experience, no doubt, served him there; but he must have had an instinct that it was dangerous with one so sensitive.  There were other moths, too, round that bright candle, and they served to keep his attentions from being too conspicuous.  Did she comprehend what was going on, understand how her defences were being sapped, grasp the danger to retreat that lay in permitting him to hover round her?  Not really.  It all served to swell the triumphant intoxication of days when she was ever more and more in love with living, more and more conscious that the world appreciated and admired her, that she had power to do what others couldn’t.

Was not Fiorsen, with his great talent, and his dubious reputation, proof of that?  And he excited her.  Whatever else one might be in his moody, vivid company, one would not be dull.  One morning, he told her something of his life.  His father had been a small Swedish landowner, a very strong man and a very hard drinker; his mother, the daughter of a painter.  She had taught him the violin, but died while he was still a boy.  When he was seventeen he had quarrelled with his father, and had to play his violin for a living in the streets of Stockholm.  A well-known violinist, hearing him one day, took him in hand.  Then his father had drunk himself to death, and he had inherited the little estate.  He had sold it at once—­“for follies,” as he put it crudely.  “Yes, Miss Winton; I have committed many follies, but they are nothing to those I shall commit the day I do not see you any more!” And, with that disturbing remark, he got up and left her.  She had smiled at his words, but within herself she felt excitement, scepticism, compassion, and something she did not understand at all.  In those days, she understood herself very little.