Surely this great unknown grief was passing--surely her adored one
would settle down again.
CHAPTER XXXI
But the months went by without healing Paul's grief. Time only coated it
with a dull, callous crust. He had got into a hard way of taking everything
as it came. He did not fly from society, or ape the manners of the
misanthrope; he went to London, and stayed about and played the game. But
all with a stony, bald indifference which made people wonder.
No faintest inkling of his story had ever leaked out. And it seemed an
incomprehensible attitude towards life for a young and fortunate man.
Those who had looked for great things from his birthday speech shook their
heads sadly at the unfulfilment.
So time passed on, until one day at the beginning of February, nearly five
years after the light had gone out of his life, a circumstance happened
which proved a turning-point of great magnitude.
It was quite a small thing--just the brutalised hardness in a gipsy woman's
face!
The sun was setting that late afternoon when he strode home across the moor
with Pike, and they came upon some gipsy vans. Paul looked up--it was no
unaccustomed sight, only they happened to be in exactly the same spot where
the like had stood that morning long ago, when in his exuberant happiness
at the news of his little son's birth he had tossed the young woman the
sovereign.
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