Then the girl relapsed,
her feet a little forward, her head a little forward, her back against
the door. Gyp, who knew why she stood thus, was swept again by those
two emotions--rage against men, and fellow feeling for one about to go
through what she herself had just endured.
"It's all right," she said, gently; "only, what's to be done?"
Daphne Wing put her hands up over her white face and sobbed. She sobbed
so quietly but so terribly deeply that Gyp herself had the utmost
difficulty not to cry. It was the sobbing of real despair by a creature
bereft of hope and strength, above all, of love--the sort of weeping
which is drawn from desolate, suffering souls only by the touch of
fellow feeling. And, instead of making Gyp glad or satisfying her sense
of justice, it filled her with more rage against her husband--that he
had taken this girl's infatuation for his pleasure and then thrown her
away. She seemed to see him discarding that clinging, dove-fair girl,
for cloying his senses and getting on his nerves, discarding her with
caustic words, to abide alone the consequences of her infatuation. She
put her hand timidly on that shaking shoulder, and stroked it. For a
moment the sobbing stopped, and the girl said brokenly:
"Oh, Mrs. Fiorsen, I do love him so!" At those naive words, a painful
wish to laugh seized on Gyp, making her shiver from head to foot.
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