At about five, he
woke with "an awful cold feeling in my heart," as he wrote to Gyp next
day--"an awful feeling, my Gyp; I walked up and down for hours" (in
reality, half an hour at most). "How shall I bear to be away from you at
this time? I feel lost." Next day, he found himself in Paris with Rosek.
"I could not stand," he wrote, "the sight of the streets, of the garden,
of our room. When I come back I shall stay with Rosek. Nearer to the
day I will come; I must come to you." But Gyp, when she read the letter,
said to Winton: "Dad, when it comes, don't send for him. I don't want
him here."
With those letters of his, she buried the last remnants of her feeling
that somewhere in him there must be something as fine and beautiful
as the sounds he made with his violin. And yet she felt those letters
genuine in a way, pathetic, and with real feeling of a sort.
From the moment she reached Mildenham, she began to lose that
hopelessness about herself; and, for the first time, had the sensation
of wanting to live in the new life within her. She first felt it, going
into her old nursery, where everything was the same as it had been when
she first saw it, a child of eight; there was her old red doll's house,
the whole side of which opened to display the various floors; the worn
Venetian blinds, the rattle of whose fall had sounded in her ears so
many hundred times; the high fender, near which she had lain so often
on the floor, her chin on her hands, reading Grimm, or "Alice in
Wonderland," or histories of England.
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