Gone! The ordeal over! And Gyp said:
"Let's go up, darling."
She felt as if they had both escaped a deadly peril--not from anything
those two could do to him or her, but from the cruel ache and jealousy
of the past, which the sight of that man would have brought him.
Women, for their age, are surely older than men--married women, at all
events, than men who have not had that experience. And all through
those first weeks of their life together, there was a kind of wise
watchfulness in Gyp. He was only a boy in knowledge of life as she
saw it, and though his character was so much more decided, active, and
insistent than her own, she felt it lay with her to shape the course and
avoid the shallows and sunken rocks. The house they had seen together
near the river, under the Berkshire downs, was still empty; and while it
was being got ready, they lived at a London hotel. She had insisted that
he should tell no one of their life together. If that must come, she
wanted to be firmly settled in, with little Gyp and Betty and the
horses, so that it should all be for him as much like respectable
married life as possible. But, one day, in the first week after their
return, while in her room, just back from a long day's shopping, a card
was brought up to her: "Lady Summerhay." Her first impulse was to be
"not at home"; her second, "I'd better face it.
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