He came
in on tiptoe, stood looking at her a minute, then crossed very swiftly
to the bed, very swiftly knelt down, and, taking her hand, turned it
over and put his face to it. The bristles of his moustache tickled her
palm; his nose flattened itself against her fingers, and his lips kept
murmuring words into the hand, with the moist warm touch of his lips.
Gyp knew he was burying there all his remorse, perhaps the excesses he
had committed while she had been away from him, burying the fears he had
felt, and the emotion at seeing her so white and still. She felt that in
a minute he would raise a quite different face. And it flashed through
her: "If I loved him I wouldn't mind what he did--ever! Why don't I love
him? There's something loveable. Why don't I?"
He did raise his face; his eyes lighted on the baby, and he grinned.
"Look at this!" he said. "Is it possible? Oh, my Gyp, what a funny one!
Oh, oh, oh!" He went off into an ecstasy of smothered laughter; then his
face grew grave, and slowly puckered into a sort of comic disgust. Gyp
too had seen the humours of her baby, of its queer little reddish pudge
of a face, of its twenty-seven black hairs, and the dribble at its
almost invisible mouth; but she had also seen it as a miracle; she
had felt it, and there surged up from her all the old revolt and more
against his lack of consideration.
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