“Oh, yes! The violinist. Life's a bit of a gamble, isn't it?”
Gyp did not answer that odd remark, did not quite know what to make of this audacious young man, whose hazel eyes and lazy smile were queerly lovable, but whose face in repose had such a broad gravity. He took from his pocket a little red book.
“Do you know these? I always take them travelling. Finest things ever written, aren't they?”
The book—Shakespeare's Sonnets—was open at that which begins:
“Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove—”
Gyp read on as far as the lines:
“Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come.
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks
But bears it out even to the edge of doom—”
and looked out of the window. The train was passing through a country of fields and dykes, where the sun, far down in the west, shone almost level over wide, whitish-green space, and the spotted cattle browsed or stood by the ditches, lazily flicking their tufted tails. A shaft of sunlight flowed into the carriage, filled with dust motes; and, handing the little book back through that streak of radiance, she said softly:
“Yes; that's wonderful. Do you read much poetry?”
“More law, I'm afraid. But it is about the finest thing in the world, isn't it?”