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The Lamp of Fate

by Margaret Pedler · English · Gutenberg #3824 · 566,504 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Lamp of Fate

Author: Margaret Pedler


        
Release date: April 13, 2006 [eBook #3824]
                Most recently updated: April 29, 2018

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3824

Credits: Produced by Dagny; John Bickers; David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LAMP OF FATE ***




Produced by Dagny; John Bickers





THE LAMP OF FATE


By Margaret Pedler


     Then to the rolling Heav’n itself I cried,
     Asking, “What Lamp of Destiny to guide
        Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?”
      And--“A blind Understanding!” Heaven replied.
     The “Rubaiyat” of Omar Khayyam.


To AUDREY HEATH

DEAR AUDREY: I always feel that you have played the part of Fairy
Godmother in a very special and delightful way to all my stories, and
in particular to this one, the plot of which I outlined to you one
afternoon in an old summer-house. So will you let me dedicate it to you?
Yours always,

MARGARET PEDLER.





THE LAMP OF FATE




PART ONE



CHAPTER I

THE NINTH GENERATION

The house was very silent. An odour of disinfectants pervaded the
atmosphere. Upstairs hushed, swift steps moved to and fro.

Hugh Vallincourt stood at the window of his study, staring out with
unseeing eyes at the smooth, shaven lawns and well-kept paths with their
background of leafless trees. It seemed to him that he had been standing
thus for hours, waiting--waiting for someone to come and tell him that a
son and heir was born to him.

He never doubted that it would be a son. By some freak of chance
the first-born of the Vallincourts of Coverdale had been, for eight
successive generations, a boy. Indeed, by this time, the thing had
become so much a habit that no doubts or apprehensions concerning the
sex of the eldest child were ever entertained. It was accepted as a
foregone conclusion, and in the eyes of the family there was a certain
gratifying propriety about such regularity. It was like a hall-mark of
heavenly approval.

Hugh Vallincourt, therefore, was conscious at this critical moment of
no questionings on that particular score. He was merely a prey to the
normal tremors and agitations of a husband and prospective father.

For an ageless period, it seemed to him, his thoughts had clung about
that upstairs room where his wife lay battling for her own life and
another’s. Suddenly they swung back to the time, a year ago, when he
had first met her--an elusive feminine thing still reckoning her age in
teens--beneath the glorious blue and gold canopy of the skies of Italy.

Their meeting and brief courtship had been pure romance--romance such
as is bred in that land of mellow warmth and colour, where the flower of
passion sometimes buds and blooms within the span of a single day.

In like manner had sprung to life the love between Hugh Vallincourt
and Diane Wielitzska, and rarely has the web of love enmeshed two more
dissimilar and ill-matched people--Hugh, a man of seven-and-thirty, the
strict and somewhat self-conscious head of a conspicuously devout old
English family, and Diane, a beautiful dancer of mixed origin, the
illegitimate offspring of a Russian grand-duke and of a French artist’s
model of the Latin Quarter.

The three dread Sisters who determine the fate of men must have laughed
amongst themselves at such an obvious mismating, knowing well how
inevitably it would tangle the threads of many other lives than the two
immediately concerned.

Vallincourt had been brought up on severely conventional lines, reared
in the narrow tenets of a family whose salient characteristics were
an overweening pride of race and a religious zeal amounting almost to
fanaticism, while Diane had had no up-bringing worth speaking of. As for
religious views, she hadn’t any.

Yet neither the one nor the other had counted in the scale when the
crucial moment came.

Perhaps it was by way of an ironical set-off against his environment
that Fate had dowered Hugh with his crop of ruddy hair--and with the
ardent temperament which usually accompanies the type. Be that as it
may, he was swept completely off his feet by the dancer’s magic beauty.
The habits and training of a lifetime went by the board, and nothing
was allowed to impede the swift (not to say violent) course of his
love-making. Within a month from the day of their first meeting, he and
Diane were man and wife.

The consequences were almost inevitable, and Hugh found that his married
life speedily resolved itself into an endless struggle between the
dictates of inclination and conscience. Everything that was man in him
responded passionately to the appeal and charm of Diane’s personality,
whilst everything that was narrow and censorious disapproved her total
inability to conform to the ingrained prejudices of the Vallincourts.

Not that Diane was in any sense of the word a bad woman. She was merely
beautiful and irresponsible--a typical _cigale_ of the stage--lovable
and kind-hearted and pagan, and possessing but the haziest notions of
self-control and self-discipline. Even so, left to themselves, husband
and wife might ultimately have found the road to happiness across the
bridge of their great love for one another.

But such freedom was denied them. Always at Hugh’s elbow stood his
sister, Catherine, a rigidly austere woman, in herself an epitome of all
that Vallincourts had ever stood for.

Since the death of their parents, twenty years previously, Catherine had
shared her brother’s home, managing his house--and, on the strength of
her four years’ seniority in age, himself as well--with an iron hand.
Nor had she seen fit to relinquish the reins of government when he
married.

Privately, Hugh had hoped she might consider the propriety of
withdrawing to the dower house attached to the Coverdale estates, but if
the idea had occurred to her, she had never given it utterance, and Hugh
himself had lacked the courage to propose such an innovation.

So it followed that Catherine was ever at hand to criticise and condemn.
She disapproved of her brother’s marriage wholly and consistently. In
her eyes, he had committed an unpardonable sin in allying himself with
Diane Wielitzska. It was his duty to have married a woman of the type
conventionally termed “good,” whose blood--and religious outlook--were
alike unimpeachable; and since he had lamentably failed in this respect,
she never ceased to reproach him. Diane she regarded with chronic
disapprobation, exaggerating all her faults and opposing her joy-loving,
butterfly nature with an aloofly puritanical disdain.

Amid the glacial atmosphere of disapproval into which marriage had
thrust her, Diane found her only solace in Virginie, a devoted French
servant who had formerly been her nurse, and who literally worshipped
the ground she walked on. Conversely, Virginie’s attitude towards Miss
Vallincourt was one of frank hostility. And deep in the hearts of
both Diane and Virginie lurked a confirmed belief that the birth of a
child--a son--would serve to bring about a better understanding between
husband and wife, and in the end assure Diane her rightful place as
mistress of the house.

“_Vois-tu_, Virginie,” the latter would say hopefully. “When I have a
little baby, I shall have done my duty as the wife of a great
English milord. Even Miss Catherine will no longer regard me as of no
importance.”

And Virginie would reply with infinite satisfaction:

“Of a certainty, when madame has a little son, Ma’moiselle Catherine
will be returned to her place.”

And now at last the great moment had arrived, and upstairs Catherine and
Virginie were in attendance--both ousted from what each considered her
own rightful place of authority by a slim, capable, and apparently quite
unconcerned piece of femininity equipped against rebellion in all the
starched panoply of a nurse’s uniform, while downstairs Hugh stared
dumbly out at the frosted lawns, with their background of bare, brown
trees swaying to the wind from the north.

The door behind him opened suddenly. Hugh whirled round. He was a
tall man with a certain rather formal air of stateliness about him,
a suggestion of the _grand seigneur_, and the unwontedly impulsive
movement was significant of the strain under which he was labouring.

Catherine was standing on the threshold of the room with something in
her arms--something almost indistinguishable amid the downy, fleecy
froth of whiteness amid which it lay.

Hugh was conscious of a new and strange sensation deep down inside
himself. He felt rather as though all the blood in his body had rushed
to one place--somewhere in the middle of it--and were pounding there
against his ribs.

He tried to speak, failed, then instinctively stretched out his arms for
the tiny, orris-scented bundle which Catherine carried.

The next thing of which he was conscious was Catherine’s voice as she
placed his child in his arms--very quiet, yet rasping across the tender
silence of the room like a file.

“Here, Hugh, is the living seal which God Himself has set upon the sin
of your marriage.”

Hugh’s eyes, bent upon the pink, crumpled features of the scrap of
humanity nestled amid the bunchy whiteness in his arms, sought his
sister’s face. It was a thin, hard face, sharply cut like carved ivory;
the eyes a light, cold blue, ablaze with hostility; the pale obstinate
lips, usually folded so impassively one above the other, working
spasmodically.

For a moment brother and sister stared at each other in silence. Then,
all at once, Catherine’s rigidly enforced composure snapped.

“A girl child, Hugh!” she jeered violently. “A _girl_--when you prayed
for a boy!”

“A girl?”

Hugh stared stupidly at the babe in his arms.

“Ay, a girl!” taunted Catherine, her voice cracking with rising
hysteria. “_A girl!_ . . . For eight generations the first-born has been
a son. And the ninth is a girl! The daughter of a foreign dancing-woman!
. . . God has indeed taken your punishment into His own Hands!”



CHAPTER II

THE WIDENING GULF

The birth of a daughter came upon Hugh in the light of an almost
overwhelming shock. He was quite silent when, in response to Catherine’s
imperative gesture, he surrendered the child into her arms once more.
As she took it from him he noticed that those thin, angular arms of hers
seemed to close round the little swaddled body in an almost jealously
possessive clasp. But there was none of the tender possessiveness of
love about it. In some oddly repugnant way it reminded him of the motion
of a bird of prey at last gripping triumphantly in its talons a victim
that has hitherto eluded pursuit.

He turned back dully to his contemplation of the wintry garden, nor, in
his absorption, did he hear the whimpering cry--almost of protest--that
issued from the lips of his first-born as Catherine bore the child away.

For a space it seemed as though his mind were a blank, every thought and
feeling wiped out of it by the stupendous, nullifying fact that his wife
had given birth to a daughter. Then, with a rush as torturing as the
return of blood to benumbed limbs, emotions crowded in upon him.

Catherine’s incessant denunciations of his “sin” in marrying Diane
Wielitzska--poured upon him without stint throughout this first year of
his marriage--seemed to din in his ears anew. Such phrases as “selling
your soul,” “putting a woman of that type in our sainted mother’s
place,” “mingling the blood of a foreign dancing-woman with our own,”
 jangled against each other in his mind.

Had he really been guilty of a sin against his conscience--satisfied his
desires irrespective of all sense of duty?

He began to think he had, and to wonder in a disturbed fashion if God
thought so too. What was it Catherine had said? _“God has indeed taken
your punishment into His own Hands.”_

Hugh was only too well aware of the facts which gave the speech its
trenchant significance. He himself had inherited owing to the death of
an elder brother in early childhood. But there was no younger brother
to step into his own shoes, and failing an heir in the direct line of
succession the title and entailed estate would of necessity go to Rupert
Vallincourt, a cousin--a gay and debonair young rake of much charm of
manner and equal absence of virtue. From both Catherine’s and Hugh’s
point of view he was the last man in the world fitted to become the head
of the family. Hence the eagerness with which they had anticipated the
arrival of a son and heir.

And now, prompted by Catherine’s bitter taunt, the birth of a daughter
as his first-born--the first happening of the kind for eight successive
generations--appeared to Hugh in the light of a direct manifestation of
God’s intention that no son born of Diane Wielitzska should be dowered
with such influence as the heir to the Vallincourts must necessarily
wield.

Better, even, that the title and estates should go to Rupert! Bad as
his reputation might be, good blood ran in his veins on either side--an
inherited tradition of right-doing which was bound to assert itself in
succeeding generations. Whereas in the offspring of Diane heaven alone
knew what hidden inherited tendencies towards evil might lie fallow, to
develop later and work incalculable mischief in the world.

Hugh felt crushed by the unexpected blow which had befallen him. Since
his marriage, he had opposed a forced indifference to his sister’s
irreconcilable attitude, finding compensation in the glowing moments of
his passion for Diane. Nevertheless--since living in an atmosphere of
disapproval tends to fray the strongest nerves--his temper had worn a
little fine beneath the strain; and with Diane’s faults and failings
thrust continually on his notice he had unconsciously grown more
critical of her.

And now, all at once, it seemed as though scales had been torn from his
eyes. He saw his marriage for the first time from the same standpoint as
Catherine saw it, and in the unlooked-for birth of a daughter he thought
he recognised the Hand of God, sternly uprooting his most cherished
hopes and minimising, as much as possible, the inevitable evil
consequences of his weakness in marrying Diane.

He was conscious of a rising feeling of resentment against his wife.
Words from an old Book flashed into his mind: _“The woman tempted me.”_

With the immediate instinct of a weak nature--the very narrowness
and rigidity of his views was a manifestation of weakness, had he but
realised it--he was already looking for someone with whom to share the
blame for his lapse from the Vallincourt standard of conduct, and in
that handful of wayward charm, red lips, and soft, beguiling eyes which
was Diane he found what he sought.



Again the room door opened. This time, instead of putting a longed-for
end to a blank period of suspense, the little quiet clicking of the
latch cut almost aggressively across the conflict of Hugh’s thoughts. He
turned round irritably.

“What is it?” he demanded.

A uniformed nurse was standing in the doorway. At the sound of his
curtly-spoken question she glanced at him with a certain contemplative
curiosity in her eyes. They might have held surprise as well as
curiosity had she not lately stood beside that huge, canopied bed
upstairs, listening pitifully to a woman’s secret fears and longings,
unveiled in the delirium of pain.

“I know you sometimes wish you hadn’t married me. . . . I’m not good
enough. And Catherine hates me. Yes, she does, she does! And she’ll make
you hate me too! But you won’t hate me when my baby comes, will you,
Hugh? You want a little son . . . a little son . . .”

Nurse Maynard could hear again the weary, complaining voice, trailing
off at last in the silence of exhaustion, and an impulse of indignation
added a sharp edge to her tone as she responded to Hugh’s query.

“Her ladyship is asking to see you, Sir Hugh. She ought to rest now, but
she is too excited. She has been expecting you.”

There was no mistaking the implied rebuke in the last sentence, and
Hugh’s face darkened.

“I’ll come,” he said, briefly, and followed the crisp starched figure
up the stairs and into a half-darkened room, smelling faintly of
antiseptics.

Vaguely the white counterpane outlined the slim figure of Diane upon the
bed. The nurse raised the blind a little, and the light of the westering
sun fell across the pillow, revealing a small, dark head which turned
eagerly at the sound of Hugh’s entrance.

“Hugh!” The voice from the bed came faintly.

Hugh looked down at his wife. Probably never had Diane looked more
beautiful.

The little worldly, sophisticated expression common to her features had
been temporarily obliterated by the holy suffering of motherhood, and
the face of the “foreign dancing-woman,” born and bred in a quarter of
the world where virtue is a cheap commodity, was as pure and serene as
the face of a Madonna.

She held out her hands to her husband, her lips curving into a smile
that was all love and tenderness.

“Hugh--_mon adore!_”

The lover in him sent him swiftly to her side, and as he drew her
into his arms she let her head fall back against his shoulder with a
tremulous sigh of infinite content.

And then, from the firelit corner of the room, came the sound of a
feeble wailing. Hugh started as though stung, and his eyes left his
wife’s face and riveted themselves upon the figure in the low chair by
the hearth--Virginie, rocking a little as she sat, and crooning a Breton
lullaby to the baby in her arms.

In a moment remembrance rushed upon him, cutting in twain as though
with a dividing sword this exquisite moment of reunion with his wife.
Insensibly his arms relaxed their clasp of the frail body they held, and
Diane, sensing their slackening, looked up startled and disconcerted.

Her eyes followed the direction of his glance, then, coming back to
his face, searched it wildly. Instantly she knew the meaning of that
suddenly limp clasp and all that it implied.

“Hugh!” The throbbing tenderness had gone out of her voice, leaving it
dry and toneless. “Hugh! You don’t mean . . . you’re _angry_ that it’s a
girl?”

He looked down at her--at the frightened eyes, the lovely face fined by
recent pain, and all his instinct was to reassure and comfort her. But
something held him back. The old, narrow creed in which he had been
reared, whose shackles he had broken through when he had recklessly
followed the bidding of his heart and married Diane, was once more
mastering him--bidding him resist the natural human impulses of love and
kindliness evoked by his wife’s appeal.

_“God Himself has taken your punishment into His own Hands.”_

Again he seemed to hear Catherine’s accusing tones, and the fanatical
strain inbred in him answered like a boat to its helm. There must be no
more compromise, no longer any evasion of the issues of right and wrong.
He had sinned, and both he and the woman for whose sake he had defied
his own creed, and that of his fathers before him, must make atonement.
He drew himself up, and stood stiff and unbending beside the bed. In his
light-grey eyes there shone that same indomitable ardour of the zealot
which had shone in Catherine’s.

“No,” he said. “I am not angry that the child is a girl. I accept it as
a just retribution.”

No man possessed of the ordinary instincts of common humanity would have
so greeted his wife just when she had emerged, spent and exhausted,
from woman’s supreme conflict with death. But the fanatic loses sight of
normal values, and Hugh, obsessed by his newly conceived idea of atoning
for the sin of his marriage, was utterly oblivious of the enormity of
his conduct as viewed through unbiased eyes.

The woman who had just fought her way through the Valley of the Shadow
stared at him uncomprehendingly.

“Retribution?” she repeated blankly.

“For my marriage--our marriage.”

Diane’s breath came faster.

“What--what do you mean?” she asked falteringly. Suddenly a look of
sheer terror leaped into her eyes, and she clutched at Hugh’s sleeve.
“Oh, you’re not going to be like Catherine? Say you’re not! Hugh, you’ve
always said she was crazy to call our marriage a sin. . . . _A sin!_”
 She tried to laugh, but the laugh stuck in her throat, caught and pinned
there by the terror that gripped her.

“Yes, I’ve said that. I’ve said it because I wanted to think it,” he
returned remorselessly, “not because I really thought it.”

Diane dragged herself up on to her elbow.

“I don’t understand. You’ve not changed?” Then, as he made no answer:
“Hugh, you’re frightening me! What do you mean? What has Catherine been
saying to you?”

Her voice rose excitedly. A patch of feverish colour appeared on either
cheek. Old Virginie sprung up from her chair by the fire, alarmed.

“You excite madame!”

Hugh turned to leave the room.

“We’ll discuss this another time, Diane,” he said.

Diane moved her head fretfully.

“No. Now--now! Don’t go! Hugh!”

Her voice rose almost to a scream and simultaneously the nurse came
hurrying in from the adjoining room. She threw one glance at the
patient, huddled flushed and excited against the pillows, then without
more ado she marched up to Hugh and, taking him by the shoulders with
her small, capable hands, she pushed him out of the room.

“Do you want to _kill_ your wife?” she demanded in a low voice of
concentrated anger. “If so, you’re going the right way about it.”

The next moment the door closed behind her, and Hugh found himself
standing alone on the landing outside it.



Although the scene with her husband did not kill Diane, it went very
near it. For some time she was dangerously ill, but at last the combined
efforts of doctor and nurse restored her once more to a frail hold upon
life, and the resiliency of youth accomplished the rest.

Curiously enough, the remembrance of Hugh’s brief visit to her bedside
held for her no force of reality. When the fever which had ensued
abated, she described the whole scene in detail to Virginie and the
nurse as an evil dream which she had had--and pitifully they let her
continue in this belief.

Even Hugh himself had been compelled, under protest, to take part in
this deception. The doctor, a personal friend of his, had not minced
matters.

“You’ve acted the part of an unmitigated coward, Vallincourt--salving
your own fool conscience at your wife’s expense. Even if you no longer
love her--”

“But I do love her,” protested Hugh. “I--I _worship_ her!”

Jim Lancaster stared. In common with most medical men he was more or
less used to the odd vagaries of human nature, but Hugh’s attitude
struck him as altogether incomprehensible.

“Then what in the name of thunder have you been getting at?” he
demanded.

“I both love and hate her,” declared Hugh wretchedly.

“That’s rot,” retorted the other. “It’s impossible.”

“It’s not impossible.”

Hugh rose and began pacing backwards and forwards. Lancaster’s eyes
rested on him thoughtfully. The man had altered during the last few
weeks--altered incredibly. He was a stone lighter to start with, and
his blond, clear-cut face had the worn look born of mental conflict. His
eyes were red-rimmed as though from insufficient sleep.

“It’s not impossible.” Hugh paused in his restless pacing to and fro. “I
love her because I can’t help myself. I hate her because I ought never
to have married her--never made a woman of her type the mother of my
child.”

“All mothers are sacred,” suggested the doctor quietly.

Hugh seemed not to hear him.

“How long is this pretence to go on, Lancaster?” he demanded irritably.

“What pretence?”

“This pretence that nothing is changed--nothing altered--between my wife
and myself?”

“For ever, I hope. So that, after all, there will have been no
pretence.”

But the appeal of the speech was ineffectual. Hugh looked at the other
man unmoved.

“It’s no use hoping that you and I can see things from the same
standpoint,” he added stubbornly. “I’ve made my decision--laid down
the lines of our future life together. I’m only waiting till you, as a
medical man, tell me that Diane’s health is sufficiently restored for me
to inform her.”

“No woman is ever in such health that you can break her heart with
impunity.”

Hugh’s light-grey eyes gleamed like steel.

“Will you answer my question?” he said curtly.

Lancaster sprang up.

“Diane is in as good health now as ever she was,” he said violently. And
strode out of the room.



During the period of her convalescence Diane, attended by Nurse Maynard,
had occupied rooms situated in a distant wing of the house, where the
invalid was not likely to be disturbed by the coming and going of other
members of the household, and it was with almost the excitement of
a schoolgirl coming home for the holidays that, when she was at last
released from the doctor’s supervision, she retook possession of her
own room. She superintended joyously the restoration to their accustomed
place her various little personal possessions, and finally peeped into
her husband’s adjoining room, thinking she heard him moving there.

On the threshold she paused irresolutely, conscious of an odd sense of
confusion. The room was vacant. But, beyond that, its whole aspect was
different somehow, unfamiliar. Her eyes wandered to the dressing-table.
Instead of holding its usual array of silver-backed brushes and polished
shaving tackle, winking in the sunshine, it was empty. She stared at
it blankly. Then her glance travelled slowly round the room. It had a
strangely untenanted look. There was no sign of masculine attire left
carelessly about--not a chair or table was a hairbreadth out of its
appointed place.

Her hand, resting lightly on the door-handle, gripped it with a sudden
tensity. The next moment she had crossed the room and torn open the
doors of the great armoire where Hugh kept his clothes. This, too, was
empty--shelves and hanger alike. Impulsively she rang the bell and,
when a maid appeared in response, demanded to know the meaning of the
alteration.

The girl glanced at her with the veiled curiosity of her class.

“It was made by Sir Hugh’s orders, my lady.”

With an effort, Diane hid the sudden tumult of bewilderment and fear
that filled her. Her dream! Had it been only a dream? Or had it been
an actual happening--that terrible little scene with her husband when,
standing rigid and unbending beside her bed, he had told her that the
birth of their daughter was a just retribution for a union he regarded
as a sin?

Memories of their brief year of marriage came surging over her in a
torrent--Catherine’s narrow-minded opposition and disapproval, Hugh’s
own moodiness and irritability and, latterly, his not infrequent
censure. There had been times when Diane--rebuked incessantly--had
fancied she must be the Scarlet Woman herself, or at least a very near
relative. And then had come moments when Hugh, carried away by his
ardour, had once more played the lover as he alone knew how, with all
the warmth and abandon of those days when he had wooed her in Italy, and
Diane would forget her unhappiness and fears in the sure knowledge that
she was a passionately beloved woman.

But always she was subconsciously aware of a sense of strife--of
struggle, as though Hugh loved her in spite of himself, in defiance of
some inner mandate of conscience which accused him.

And now, fear mastered her. Her dream had been a reality. And this--this
sweeping away from what had been his room of every familiar little
personal possession--was the symbol of some new and terribly changed
relation between them.

Forcing herself to move composedly while the maid still watched her,
she walked slowly out of the room, but the instant the door had closed
behind her she flew downstairs to her husband’s study and, not pausing
to comply with the unwritten law which forbade entrance there without
express permission, broke in upon him as he sat at his desk, busily
occupied with his morning mail.

“Diane!”

Hugh turned towards her with a cold light of astonished disapproval in
his eyes.

“You know I don’t like to be interrupted----”

“I know, I know. But I _had_ to come. Something’s happened. There’s been
a mistake. . . . Hugh, they’ve taken everything out of your room. All
your things.”

She stood beside him breathlessly awaiting his reply--her passionate
dark eyes fixed on his face, two patches of brilliant colour showing on
the high cheek-bones that bore witness to her Russian origin.

They made a curious contrast--husband and wife. She, a slender thing of
fire and flame, hands clenched, lips quivering--woman every inch of her;
he, immaculate and composed, his face coldly expressionless, yet with
a hint of something warmer, a suppressed glow, beneath the deliberately
chill glance of those curious light-grey eyes--the man and bigoted
fanatic fighting for supremacy within him.

“Hugh! Answer me! Don’t sit staring at me like that!” Diane’s voice held
a sharpened sound.

At last he spoke, very slowly and carefully.

“There has been no mistake, Diane. Everything that has been done has
been with my sanction--by my order. Our marriage has been a culpable
mistake. Catherine realised it from the beginning. I only realise
my full guilt now that I am punished. But whatever I can do in
atonement--reparation, that I have made up my mind to do. The first--the
chief thing--is that our married life is at an end.”

She heard him with a curious absence of surprise. Somehow, from the
instant she had seen his dismantled room she had known, known surely,
that the long fight between herself and Catherine was over. And that
Catherine had won.

“At an end? Hugh, what do you mean? What are you going to do? You’re
not, you’re not going to send me away?”

“No, not that. I’ve no right to punish you. You’ve been guilty of no
fault--”

“Except the fault of being myself,” she flung back bitterly.

“But I ought never to have married you. I did it, knowing you were not
fit--suitable”--he corrected himself hastily. “So I alone am to blame.
You will retain your position here as my wife--mistress of my home.”
 Diane, remembering Catherine’s despotic rule, smiled mirthlessly. “But
henceforth you will be my wife in name only. I shall have no wife.”

Diane caught that note of dull endurance in his voice, and seized upon
it. He still cared!

“Hugh, you’ve listened to Catherine till you’ve lost all sense of
truth.” She spoke gently, pleadingly. “Don’t do this thing. We’ve been
guilty of no sin that needs atonement. It isn’t wrong to love.”

But he was implacable.

“No,” he returned. “It isn’t wrong to love--but sometimes love should be
denied.”

Diane drew nearer to him, and laid her hand on his arm.

“Not ours, Hugh,” she whispered. “Not love like ours--”

“Be silent!”

Hugh sprang to his feet, his eyes ablaze, his voice hoarse and shaking.

“Don’t tempt me! Do you think I’ve found it easy to decide on this? When
every fibre of my body is calling out for you? My God, no!”

“Then don’t do it! Hugh--dearest--”

With sudden violence he caught her by the arms.

“Be silent, I tell you! Don’t tempt me! I’ll make my penance, accept the
burden laid on me--that my first-born should be a girl!”

Diane clung to him, resisting his attempt to thrust her from him.

“Hugh! Ah, wait! Listen to me! . . . Dear, some day there may be a
little son, yours and mine--”

He flung her from him violently.

“There shall never be a son of ours! Never! It is the Will of God.”

With an immense effort he checked the rising frenzy within him--the
ecstasy of the martyr embracing the stake to which he shall be bound. He
moved across to the door and held it open for her.

“And now, will you please go? That is my last word on the matter.”

Diane turned hesitatingly towards the doorway, then paused.

“Hugh----”

There was an infinite appeal in her voice. Her eyes were those of a
frightened, bewildered child.

“Go, please,” he repeated mechanically.

A convulsive sob tore its way through her throat. She stepped blindly
forward. The next moment the door closed inexorably between husband and
wife.



CHAPTER III

SAINT-MICHAEL AND THE WONDER-CHILD

Day by day her husband’s complete estrangement from her was rendered
additionally bitter to Diane by Catherine’s complacent air of triumph.
The latter knew that she had won, severed the tie which bound her
brother to “the foreign dancing-woman,” and she did not scruple to let
Diane see that she openly rejoiced in the fact.

At first Diane imagined that Catherine might rest content with what she
had accomplished, but the grim, hard-featured woman still continued to
exhibit the same self-righteous disapproval towards her brother’s wife
as hitherto.

Diane endured it in resentful silence for a time, but one day, stung by
some more than usually acid speech of Catherine’s, she turned on her,
demanding passionately why she seemed to hate her even more since the
birth of the child.

“I nearly gave my life for her,” she protested with fierce simplicity.
“I could do no more! Is it because _le bon dieu_ has sent me a little
daughter instead of a little son that you hate me so much?”

And Catherine had answered her in a voice of quiet, concentrated
animosity:

“If you had died then--_died childless_--I should have thanked God day
and night.”

Diane, isolated and unhappy, turned to her baby for consolation. It was
all that was left to her out of the wreck of her life, and the very fact
that both Hugh and Catherine seemed to regard the little daughter with
abhorrence only served to strengthen the passionate worship which she
herself lavished upon her.

The child--they had called her Magda--was an odd little creature, as
might have been expected from the violently opposing characteristics of
her parents.

She was slenderly made--built on the same lithe lines as her mother--and
almost as soon as she was able to walk she manifested an amazing balance
and suppleness of limb. By the time she was four years old she was
trying to imitate, with uncertain little feet and dimpled, aimlessly
waving arms, the movements of her mother, when to amuse the child, she
would sometimes dance for her.

However big a tragedy had occurred in Magda’s small world--whether it
were a crack across the insipid china face of a favourite doll or the
death of an adored Persian kitten--there was still balm in Gilead if
_“petite maman”_ would but dance for her. The tears shining in big drops
on her cheeks, her small chest still heaving with the sobs that were
a passionate protest against unkind fate, Magda would sit on the floor
entranced, watching with adoring eyes every swift, graceful motion of
the dancer, and murmuring in the quaint shibboleth of French and English
she had imbibed from old Virginie.

On one of these occasions Hugh came upon the two unexpectedly and
brought the performance to a summary conclusion.

“That will do, Diane,” he said icily. “I should have thought you would
have had more self-respect than to dance--in that fashion--in front of a
child.”

“It is, then, a sin to dance--as it is to be married?” demanded Diane
bitterly, abruptly checked in an exquisite spring-flower dance of her
own invention.

“I forbid it; that is sufficient,” replied Hugh sternly.

His assumption of arrogant superiority was unbearable. Diane’s
self-control wavered under it and broke. She turned and upbraided him
despairingly, alternately pleading and reproaching, battering all her
slender forces uselessly against his inflexible determination.

“This is a waste of time, Diane--mine, anyway,” he told her. And left
her shaken with grief and anger.

Driven by a sense of utter revolt, she stormed her way to Catherine, who
was composedly sorting sheets in the linen room.

“I will not bear it!” she burst out at her furiously. “What have I done
that I should be treated as an outcast--a pariah?”

Catherine regarded the tense, quivering little figure with chill
dislike.

“You married my brother,” she replied imperturbably.

“And you have separated us! But for you, we should be happy together--he
and baby and I! But you have spoilt it all. I suppose”--a hint of the
Latin Quarter element in her asserting itself--“I suppose you think no
one good enough to marry into your precious family!”

Catherine paused on her way to the cupboard, a pile of fine linen
pillowslips in her hands.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “It is I who have separated you--spoilt your
happiness, if you like. And I am glad of it. I can’t expect anyone like
you to understand”--there was the familiar flavour of disparagement in
her tones--“but I am thankful that my brother has seen the wickedness of
his marriage with you, that he has repented of it, and that he is making
the only atonement possible!”

She turned and composedly laid the pile of pillowslips in their
appointed place on the shelf. A faint fragrance of dried lavender
drifted out from the dark depths of the cupboard. Diane always
afterwards associated the smell of lavender with her memories of
Catherine Vallincourt, and the sweet, clean scent of it was spoiled for
her henceforward.

“I hate you!” she exclaimed in a low voice of helpless rage. “I hate
you--and I wish to God Hugh had never had a sister!”

“Well”--composedly--“he will not have one much longer.”

Diane stared.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that as far as our life together is concerned, it is very nearly
over.”

“Do you mean”--Diane bent towards her breathlessly--“do you mean that
you are _going away_--going away from Coverdale?”

“Yes. I am entering a sisterhood--that of the Sisters of Penitence, a
community Hugh is endowing with money that is urgently needed.”

“Endowing?”

“As part of the penance he has set himself to perform.” Catherine’s
steely glance met and held the younger woman’s. “Thanks to you, the
remainder of his life will be passed in expiation.”

Diane shook her head carelessly. Such side-issues were of relatively
small importance compared with the one outstanding, amazing fact:
Catherine was going away! Going away from Coverdale--for ever!

“Yes”--Catherine read her thoughts shrewdly--“yes, you will be rid of
me. I shall not be here much longer.”

Diane struck her hands together. For once, not even the fear of
Catherine’s gibing tongue could hold her silent.

“I’m glad--glad--_glad_ you’re going away!” she exclaimed passionately.
“When you are gone I will win back my husband.”

“Do you think so?” was all she said.

But to Diane’s keyed-up consciousness it was as though the four short
words contained a threat--the germ of future disaster.



In due time Catherine quitted Coverdale for the austere seclusion of
the sisterhood, and a very few weeks sufficed to convince Diane that her
forebodings had been only too well founded.

Catherine had long been anxious to enter a community, restrained from
doing so solely by Hugh’s need of her as mistress of his house, and
now that her wish was an accomplished fact, it seemed as though he
were spurred on to increasing effort by the example of his sister’s
renunciation of the world. He withdrew himself even more completely from
his wife, sometimes avoiding her company for days at a time, and adopted
a stringently ascetic mode of life, denying himself all pleasure,
fasting frequently, and praying and meditating for hours at a stretch
in the private chapel which was attached to Coverdale. As far as it was
possible, without actually entering a community, his existence resembled
that of a monk, and Diane came to believe that he had voluntarily vowed
himself to a certain form of penance and expiation for the marriage
which the bigotry of his nature had led him to regard as a sin.

His life only impinged upon his wife’s in so far as the upbringing of
their child was concerned. He was unnecessarily severe with her, and,
since Diane opposed his strict ruling at every opportunity, Magda’s
early life was passed in an atmosphere of fierce contradictions.

The child inherited her mother’s beauty to the full, and, as she
developed, exhibited an extraordinary faculty for getting her own way.
Servants, playmates, and governesses all succumbed to the nameless charm
she possessed, while her mother and old Virginie frankly worshipped her.

The love of dancing was instinctive with her, and this, unknown to Hugh,
her mother cultivated assiduously, fostering in her everything that
was imaginative and delicately fanciful. Magda believed firmly in
the existence of fairies and regarded flowers as each possessed of
a separate entity with personal characteristics of its own. The
originality of the dances she invented for her own amusement was the
outcome.

But, side by side with this love of all that was beautiful, she absorbed
from her mother a certain sophisticated understanding of life which was
somewhat startling in one of her tender years, and this, too, betrayed
itself in her dancing. For it is an immutable law that everything--good,
bad, and indifferent--which lies in the soul of an artist ultimately
reveals itself in his work.

And Magda, inheriting the underlying ardour of her father’s temperament
and the gutter-child’s sharp sense of values which was her mother’s
Latin Quarter garnering, at the age of eight danced, with all the
beguilement and seductiveness of a trained and experienced dancer.

Even Hugh himself was not proof against the elusive lure of it. He
chanced upon her one day, dancing in her nursery, and was so carried
away by the charm of the performance that for the moment he forgot that
she was transgressing one of his most rigid rules.

In the child’s gracious, alluring gestures he was reminded of the first
time that he had seen her mother dance, and of how it had thrilled him.
Beneath the veneer with which his self-enforced austerity had overlaid
his emotions, he felt his pulses leap, and was bitterly chagrined at
being thus attracted.

He found himself brought up forcibly once more against the inevitable
consequences of his marriage with Diane, and reasoned that through his
weakness in making such a woman his wife, he had let loose on the
world a feminine thing dowered with the seductiveness of a Delilah and
backed--here came in the exaggerated family pride ingrained in
him--by all the added weight and influence of her social position as a
Vallincourt.

“Never let me see you dance again, Magda,” he told her. “It is
forbidden. If you disobey you will be severely punished.”

Magda regarded him curiously out of a pair of long dark eyes the colour
of black smoke. With that precociously sophisticated instinct of hers
she realised that the man had been emotionally stirred, and divined in
her funny child’s mind that it was her dancing which had so stirred him.
It gave her a curious sense of power.

“Sieur Hugh is _afraid_ because he likes me to dance,” she told her
mother, with an impish little grin of enjoyment.

(On one occasion Hugh had narrated for her benefit the history of an
ancestor, one Sieur Hugues de Vallincourt, whose effigy in stone adorned
the church, and she had ever afterwards persisted in referring to her
father as “Sieur Hugh”--considerably to his annoyance, since he regarded
it as both disrespectful and unseemly.)

From this time onwards Magda seemed to take a diabolical delight
in shocking her father--experimenting on him, as it were. In some
mysterious way she had become conscious of her power to allure. Young
as she was, the instinct of conquest was awakened within her, and she
proceeded to “experiment” on certain of her father’s friends--to their
huge delight and Hugh’s intense disgust. Once, in an outburst of fury,
he epitomised her ruthlessly.

“The child has the soul of a courtesan!”

If this were so, Hugh had no knowledge of how to cope with it. His
fulminations on the subject of dancing affected her not at all, and a
few days after he had rebuked her with all the energy at his command he
discovered her dancing on a table--this time for the delectation of an
enraptured butler and staff in the servants’ hall.

Without more ado Hugh lifted her down and carried her to his study,
where he administered a sound smacking. The result astonished him
considerably.

“Do you think you can stop me from dancing by beating me?”

Magda arraigned him with passionate scorn.

“I do,” he returned grimly. “If you hurt people enough you can stop them
from committing sin. That is the meaning of remedial punishment.”

“I don’t believe it!” she stormed at him. “You might hurt me till I
_died_ of hurting, but you couldn’t make me good--not if I hated your
hurting me all the time! Because it isn’t good to hate,” she added out
of the depths of some instinctive wisdom.

“Then you’d better learn to like being punished--if that will make you
good,” retorted Hugh.

Magda sped out into the woods. Hugh’s hand had been none too light,
and she was feeling physically and spiritually sore. Her small soul was
aflame with fierce revolt.

Just to assure herself of the liberty of the individual and of the fact
that “hurting couldn’t make her good,” she executed a solitary little
dance on the green, mossy sward beneath the trees. It was rather a
painful process, since certain portions of her anatomy still tingled
from the retributive strokes of justice, but she set her teeth and
accomplished the dance with a consciousness of unholy glee that added
appreciably to the quality of the performance.

“Are you the Fairy Queen?”

The voice came suddenly out of the dim, enfolding silence of the woods,
and Magda paused in the midst of a final pirouette. A man was standing
leaning against the trunk of a tree, watching her with whimsical grey
eyes. Behind him, set up in the middle of a clearing amongst the trees,
an easel and stool evidenced his recent occupation.

Magda returned the scrutiny of the grey eyes. She was no whit
embarrassed and slowly lowered her foot--she had been toe-dancing--to
its normal position while she surveyed the newcomer with interest.

He was a tall, lean specimen of mankind, and the sunlight, quivering
between the interlacing boughs above his head, flickered on to kinky
fair hair that looked almost absurdly golden contrasted with the brown
tan of the face beneath it. It was a nice face, Magda decided, with a
dogged, squarish jaw that appealed to a certain tenacity of spirit which
was one of her own unchildish characteristics, and the keen dark-grey
eyes she encountered were so unlike the cold light-grey of her father’s
that it seemed ridiculous the English language could only supply the one
word “grey” to describe things that were so totally dissimilar.

“They’re like eyes with little fires behind them,” Magda told herself.
Then smiled at their owner radiantly.

“Are you the Fairy Queen?” he repeated gravely.

She regarded him with increasing approval.

“Yes,” she assented graciously. “These are my woods.”

“Then I’m afraid I’ve been trespassing in your majesty’s domain,”
 admitted the grey-eyed man. “But your woods are so beautiful I simply
had to try and make a sketch of them.”

Magda came back to earth with promptitude.

“Oh, are you an artist?” she demanded eagerly.

He nodded, smiling.

“I’m trying to be.”

“Let me look.” She flashed past him and planted herself in front of the
easel.

“_Mais, c’est bon!_” she commented coolly. “Me, I know. We have good
pictures at home. This is a good picture.”

The man with the grey eyes looked suitably impressed.

“I’m glad you find it so,” he replied meekly. “I think it wants just one
thing more. If”--he spoke abstractly--“if the Fairy Queen were resting
just there”--his finger indicated the exact point on the canvas--“tired,
you know, because she had been dancing to one of the Mortals--lucky
beggar, wasn’t he?--why, I think the picture would be complete.”

Magda shot him a swift glance of comprehension. Then, without a word,
she moved towards the bole of a tree and flung herself down with all the
supple grace of a young faun. The artist snatched up his palette; the
pose she had assumed without a hint from him was inimitable--the slender
limbs relaxed and drooping exactly as though from sheer fatigue. He
painted furiously, blocking in the limp little figure with swift, sure
strokes of his brush.

When at last he desisted he flung a question at her.

“Who taught you to pose--and to dance like that, you wonder-child?”

Magda surveyed him with that mixture of saint and devil in her long,
suddenly narrow eyes which, when she grew to womanhood, was the measure
of her charm and the curse of her tempestuous life.

“_Le bon dieu_,” she responded demurely.

The man smiled and shook his head. It was a crooked little smile, oddly
humorous and attractive.

“No,” he said with conviction. “No. I don’t think so.”

The daylight was beginning to fade, and he started to pack up his
belongings.

“What’s your name?” asked Magda suddenly.

“Michael.”

She looked at him with sudden awe.

“Not--not _Saint Michel_?” she asked breathlessly.

Virginie had told her all about “_Saint Michel_.” He was a very great
angel indeed. It would be tremendously exciting to find she had been
talking to him all this time without knowing it! And the grey-eyed man
had fair hair; it shone in the glinting sunset-light _almost_ like a
halo!

He quenched her hopes with that brief, one-sided smile of his.

“No,” he said. “I’m not Saint Michael. I’m only a poor devil of a
painter who’s got his way to make in the world. Perhaps, you’ve helped
me, Fairy Queen.”

And seeing that “The Repose of Titania” was the first of his paintings
to bring Michael Quarrington that meed of praise and recognition which
was later his in such full measure, perhaps she had.

“I think I’m glad you’re not a saint, after all,” remarked Magda
thoughtfully. “Saint’s are dreadfully dull and superior.”

He smiled down at her.

“Are they? How do you know?”

“Because Sieur Hugh is preparing to be one. At least Virginie says
so--and she sniffs when she says it. So you see, I know all about it.”

“I see,” he replied seriously. “And who are Sieur Hugh and Virginie?”

“Sieur Hugh is my father. And Virginie is next best to _petite maman_.
Me, I love Virginie.”

“Lucky Virginie!”

Magda made no answer, but she stood looking at him with an odd,
unchildlike deviltry in her sombre eyes.

“Fairy Queen, I should like to kiss you,” said the man suddenly. Then he
jerked his head back. “No, I wouldn’t!” he added quickly to himself. “By
Jove, it’s uncanny!”

Magda remained motionless, still staring at him with those long dark
eyes of hers. He noticed that just at the outer corners they slanted
upwards a little, giving her small, thin face a curiously Eastern look.

At last--

“Please kiss me, Saint Michael,” she said.

For a moment he hesitated, a half-rueful, half-whimsical smile on his
lips, rather as though he were laughing at himself. Then, with a shrug
of his shoulders, he stooped quickly and kissed her.

“Witch-child!” he muttered as he strode away through the woods.



CHAPTER IV

THE SEED OF EVIL

Diane sat in the twilight, brooding. Winter had come round again,
gripping the world with icy fingers, and she shivered a little as she
crouched in front of the fire.

She felt cold--cold in body and soul. The passage of time had brought no
cheery warmth of love or loving-kindness to her starved heart, and the
estrangement between herself and Hugh was as definite and absolute as
it had been the day Catherine quitted Coverdale for the Sisterhood of
Penitence.

But the years which had elapsed since then had taken their inevitable
toll. Hugh had continued along the lines he had laid down for himself,
rigidly ascetic and austere, and his mode of life now revealed itself
unmistakably in his thin, emaciated face and eyes ablaze with fanatical
fervour.

Diane, thrust into a compulsory isolation utterly foreign to her
temperament, debarred the fulfilment of her womanhood which her
spontaneous, impetuous nature craved, had drooped and pined, gradually
losing both her buoyant spirit and her health in the loveless atmosphere
to which her husband had condemned her.

She had so counted on the prospect that a better understanding between
herself and Hugh would ensue after Catherine’s departure that the
downfall of her hopes had come upon her as a bitter disappointment. Once
she had stifled her pride and begged him to live no longer as a stranger
to her. But he had repulsed her harshly, refusing her pleading with an
inexorable decision there was no combating.

Afterwards she had given herself up to despair, and gradually--almost
imperceptibly at first--her health had declined until finally, at the
urgent representations of Virginie, Hugh had called in Dr. Lancaster.

“There is no specific disease,” he had said. “But none the
less”--looking very directly at Hugh--“your wife is dying, Vallincourt.”

Diane had been told the first part of the doctor’s pronouncement, and
recommended by her husband to “rouse herself” out of her apathetic
state.

“‘No specific disease!’” she repeated bitterly, as she sat brooding in
the firelight. “No--only this death in life which I have had to endure.
Well, it will be over soon--and the sooner the better.”

The door burst open suddenly and Magda came in to the room, checking
abruptly, with a child’s stumbling consciousness of pain, as she caught
sight of her mother curled up in front of the fire, staring mutely into
its glowing heart.

“_Maman_?” she begin timidly. “_Petite maman_?”

Diane turned round.

“Cherie, is it thou?”

She kneeled up on the hearthrug and, taking the child in her arms,
searched her face with dry, bright eyes.

“Baby,” she said. “Listen! And when thou art older, remember always what
I have said.”

Magda stared at her, listening intently.

“Never, never give your heart to any man,” continued Diane. “If you
do, he will only break it for you--break it into little pieces like the
glass scent-bottle which you dropped yesterday. Take everything. But do
not give--anything--in return. Will you remember?”

And Magda answered her gravely.

“_Oui, maman_, I will remember.”

What happened after that remained always a confused blur in Magda’s
memory--a series of pictures standing out against a dark background of
haste and confusion, and whispered fears.

Suddenly her mother gave a sharp little cry and her hands went up to
her breast, while for a moment her eyes, dilated and frightened-looking,
stared agonisingly ahead. Then she toppled over sideways and lay in a
little heap on the great bearskin rung in front of the fire.

After that Virginie came running, followed by a drove of scared-looking
servants and, last of all, by Hugh himself, his face very white and
working strangely.

The car was sent off in frantic haste in search of Dr. Lancaster, and
later in the day two white-capped nurses appeared on the scene. Then
followed hours of hushed uncertainty, when people went to and fro
with hurried, muffled footsteps and spoke together in whispers, while
Virginie’s face grew yellow and drawn-looking, and the tears trickled
down her wrinkled-apple cheeks whenever one spoke to her.

Last of all someone told Magda that “_petite maman_” had gone away--and
on further inquiry Virginie vouchsafed that she had gone to somewhere
called Paradise to be with the blessed saints.

“When will she come back again?” demanded Magda practically.

Upon which Virginie had made an unpleasant choking noise in her throat
and declared:

“Never!”

Magda was frankly incredulous. _Petite maman_ would never go away like
that and leave her behind! Of that she felt convinced, and said so.
Gulping back her sobs, Virginie explained that in this case madame had
been given no choice, but added that if Magda comported herself like a
good little girl, she would one day go to be with her in Paradise. Magda
found it all very puzzling.

But when, later, she was taken into her mother’s room and saw the
slender, sheeted figure lying straight and still on the great bed,
hands meekly crossed upon the young, motionless breast, while tall white
candles burned at head and foot, the knowledge that _petite maman_ had
really gone from her seemed all at once to penetrate her childish mind.

That aloofly silent figure could not be her gay, pretty _petite
maman_--the one who had played and laughed with her and danced so
exquisitely that sometimes Magda’s small soul had ached with the sheer
beauty and loveliness of it. . . .

She met Dr. Lancaster as she came out from the candle-lit room and
clutched him convulsively by the hand.

“Is that--being dead?” she whispered, pointing to the room she had just
quitted.

Very gently he tried to explain things to her. Afterwards Magda
overheard the family lawyer asking him in appropriately shocked tones of
what complaint Lady Vallincourt had died, and there had been a curious
grim twist to Lancaster’s mouth as he made answer.

“Heart,” he said tersely.

“Ah! Very sad. Very sad indeed,” rejoined the lawyer feelingly. “These
heart complaints are very obscure sometimes, I believe?”

“Sometimes,” said Lancaster. “Not always.”



The next happening that impressed itself on Magda’s cognisance as an
event was the coming of Lady Arabella Winter. She arrived on a day of
heavy snow, and Magda’s first impression of her, as she came into the
hall muffled up to the tip of her patrician nose in a magnificent sable
wrap, was of a small, alert-eyed bird huddled into its nest.

But when the newcomer had laid aside her furs Magda’s impression
qualified itself. Lady Arabella was not in the least of the “small
bird” type, but rather suggested a hawk endowed with a grim sense
of humour--quick and decisive in movement, with eyes that held an
incalculable wisdom and laughed a thought cynically because they saw so
clearly.

Her hair was perfectly white, as white as the snow outside, but her
complexion was soft and fine-grained as that of a girl of sixteen--pink
and white like summer roses. She had the manner of an empress with
extremely modern ideas.

Magda was instructed that this great little personage was her godmother
and that she would in future live with her instead of at Coverdale.
She accepted the information without surprise though with considerable
interest.

“Think you’ll like it?” Lady Arabella shot at her keenly.

“Yes,” Magda replied unhesitatingly. “But why am I going to live with
you? Sieur Hugh isn’t dead, too, is he?”--with impersonal interest.

“And who in the name of fortune is Sieur Hugh?”

Lady Arabella looked around helplessly, and Virginia, who was hovering
in the background, hastened to explain the relationship.

“Then, no,” replied Lady Arabella. “Sieur Hugh is not dead--though to be
sure he’s the next thing to it!”

Magda eyed her solemnly.

“Is he very ill?” she asked.

“No, merely cranky like all the Vallincourts. He’s in a community,
joined a brotherhood, you know, and proposes to spend the rest of
his days repenting his sins and making his peace with heaven. I’ve no
patience with the fool!” continued the old lady irascibly. “He marries
to please himself and then hasn’t the pluck of a rabbit to see the thing
through decently. So you’re to be my responsibility in future--and a
pretty big one, too, to judge by the look of you.”

Magda hardly comprehended the full meaning of this speech. Still she
gathered that her father had left her--though not quite in the same way
as _petite maman_ had done--and that henceforth this autocratic old lady
with the hawk’s eyes and quick, darting movements was to be the arbiter
of her fate. She also divined, beneath Lady Arabella’s prickly exterior,
a humanness and ability to understand which had been totally lacking in
Sieur Hugh. She proceeded to put it to the test.

“Will you let me dance?” she asked.

“Tchah!” snorted the old woman. “So the Wielitzska blood is coming
out after all!” She turned to Virginia. “Can she dance?” she demanded
abruptly.

“Mais oui, madame!” cried Virginie, clasping her hands ecstatically.
“Like a veritable angel!”

“I shouldn’t have thought it,” commented her ladyship drily.

Her shrewd eyes swept the child’s tense little face with its long,
Eastern eyes and the mouth that showed so vividly scarlet against its
unchildish pallor.

“Less like an angel than anything, I should imagine,” muttered the old
woman to herself with a wicked little grin. Then aloud: “Show me what
you can do, then, child.”

“Very well.” Magda paused, reflecting. Then she ran forward and laid
her hand lightly on Lady Arabella’s knee. “Look! This is the story of
a Fairy who came to earth and lost her way in the woods. She met one of
the Mortals, and he loved her so much that he wouldn’t show her the way
back to Fairyland. So”--abruptly--“she died.”

Lady Arabella watched the child dance in astonished silence. Technique,
of course, was lacking, but the interpretation, the telling of the
story, was amazing. It was all there--the Fairy’s first wonder and
delight in finding herself in the woods, then her realisation that she
was lost and her frantic efforts to find the way back to Fairyland.
Followed her meeting with the Mortal and supplication to him to guide
her, and finally the Fairy’s despair and death. Magda’s slight little
figure sank to the ground, drooping slowly like a storm-bent snowdrop,
and lay still.

Lady Arabella sat up with a jerk.

“Good gracious! The child’s a born dancer! Lydia Tchinova must see her.
She’ll have to train. Poor Hugh!” She chuckled enjoyably. “This will be
the last straw! He’ll be compelled to invent a new penance.”






PART TWO



CHAPTER I

THE FLOWERING

“You’re very trying, Magda. Everyone is talking about you, and I’m tired
of trying to explain you to people.”

Lady Arabella paused in her knitting and spoke petulantly, but a secret
gleam of admiration in her sharp old eyes as they rested upon her
god-daughter belied the irritation of her tones.

Magda leaned back negligently against the big black velvet cushions in
her chair and lit a cigarette.

“I _want_ everyone to talk about me,” she returned composedly. Her voice
was oddly attractive--low-pitched and with a faint blur of huskiness
about it that caught the ear with a distinctive charm. “It increases
the box-office receipts. And there’s no reason in the world for you to
‘explain’ me to people.”

Her godmother regarded her with increasing irritation, yet at the same
time acutely conscious of the arresting quality of the young, vividly
alive face that gleamed at her from its black-velvet background.

Ten years had only served to emphasise the unusual characteristics
of the child Magda. Her skin was wonderful, of a smooth, creamy-white
texture which gave to the sharply angled face something of the pale,
exotic perfection of a stephanotis bloom. Her eyes were long, the colour
of black pansies--black with a suggestion of purple in their depths.
They slanted upwards a little at the outer corners, and this together
with the high cheek-bones, alone would have betrayed her Russian
ancestry. When Lady Arabella wanted to be particularly obnoxious
she told her that she had Mongolian eyes, and Magda would shrug her
shoulders and, thrusting out a foot which was so perfect in shape that
a painting of it by a certain famous artist had been the most talked-of
picture of the year, would reply placidly: “Well, thank heaven, _that’s_
not English, anyway!”

“It certainly required some explanation when you chose to leave me
and go off and live by yourself,” pursued Lady Arabella, resuming her
knitting. “A girl of twenty! Of course people have talked. Especially as
half the men in town imagine themselves in love with you.”

“Well, I’m perfectly respectable now. I’ve engaged a nice, tame
pussy-cat person to take charge of my morals and chaperon me
generally. Not--like you, Marraine--an Early Victorian autocrat with a
twentieth-century tongue.”

“If you mean Mrs. Grey, she doesn’t give me the least impression of
being a ‘nice, tame pussy-cat,’” retorted Lady Arabella. “You’ll find
that out, my dear.”

Magda regarded her thoughtfully.

“Do you think so?”

“I do.”

“Oh, Gillian is all right,” affirmed Magda, dismissing the matter
airily. “She’s a gorgeous accompanist, anyway--almost as good as Davilof
himself. Which reminds me--I must go home and rehearse my solo dance in
the _Swan-Maiden_. I told Davilof I’d be ready for him at four o’clock;
and it’s half-past three now. I shall never get back to Hampstead
through this ghastly fog in half an hour.” She glanced towards the
window through which was visible a discouraging fog of the “pea-soup”
 variety.

Lady Arabella sniffed.

“You’d better be careful for once in your life, Magda. Davilof is in
love with you.”

“Pouf! What if he is?”

Magda rose, and picking up her big black hat set it on her head at
precisely the right angle, and proceeded to spear it through with a
wonderful black-and-gold hatpin of Chinese workmanship.

Lady Arabella shot a swift glance at her.

“He’s just one of a crowd?” she suggested tartly.

Magda assented indifferently.

“You’re wrong--quite wrong,” returned her godmother crisply. “Antoine
Davilof is not one of a crowd--never will be! He’s half a Pole,
remember.”

Magda smiled.

“And I’m half a Russian. It must be a case of deep calling to deep,” she
suggested mockingly.

Lady Arabella’s shining needles clicked as they came to an abrupt stop.

“Does that mean you’re in love with him?” she asked.

Magda stared.

“Good gracious, no! I’m never in love. You know that.”

“That doesn’t prevent my hoping you may develop--some day--into a normal
God-fearing woman,” retorted the other.

“And learn to thank heaven, fasting, for a good man’s love?” Magda
laughed lightly. “I shan’t. At least, I hope not. Judging from my
friends and acquaintances, the condition of being in love is a most
unpleasant one--reduces a woman to a humiliating sense of her own
unworthiness and keeps her in a see-saw state of emotional uncertainty.
No, thank you! No man is worth it!”

Lady Arabella looked away. Her hard, bright old eyes held a sudden
wistfulness foreign to them.

“My dear--one man is. One man in every woman’s life is worth it. Only we
don’t always find it out in time.”

“Why, Marraine--you don’t mean--you weren’t ever----”

Lady Arabella rose suddenly and came across to where Magda stood by the
fire, one narrow foot extended to the cheerful warmth.

“Never mind what I mean,” she said, and her voice sounded a little
uncertain. “Only, if it comes your way, don’t miss the best thing this
queer old world of ours has to offer. If it brings you nothing else,
love at least leaves you memories. Even that’s something.”

Magda glanced at her curiously. Somehow she had never imagined that
behind the worldly-wise old woman’s sharp speeches and grim, ironic
humour there lay the half-buried memory of some far-distant romance. Yet
now in the uneven tones of her voice she recognised the throb of an old
wound.

“And meanwhile”--Lady Arabella suddenly resumed in her usual curt
manner--“meanwhile you might play fair with one or two of those boys you
have trailing around--Kit Raynham for instance.”

“I don’t understand,” began Magda.

“You understand perfectly. A man of the world’s fair game. He can
look after himself--and probably sizes you up for what you are--a
phenomenally successful dancer, who regards her little court of admirers
as one of the commonplaces of existence--like her morning cup of tea.
But these boys--they look upon you as a woman, even a possible wife. And
then they proceed to fall in love with you!”

Magda’s foot tapped impatiently on the floor.

“What’s this all leading up to?”

Lady Arabella met her glance squarely.

“I want you to leave Kit Raynham alone. His mother has been to
me--Magda, I’m sick of having their mothers come to me!--and begged
me to interfere. She says you’re ruining the boy’s prospects. He’s a
brilliant lad, and they expect him to do something rather special. And
now he’s slacking completely. He’s always on your doorstep. If you care
about him--do you, Magda?--tell him so. But, if you don’t, for goodness’
sake send him about his business.”

She waited quietly for an answer. Magda slipped into a big fur-coat and
caught up her gloves. Then she turned to her godmother abruptly.

“Lady Raynham is absurd. I can’t prevent Kit’s making a fool of himself
if he wants to. And--and”--rather helplessly--“I can’t help it if I
don’t fall in love to order.” She kissed her godmother lightly. “So
that’s that.”

A minute later Lady Arabella’s butler had swung open the front door, and
Magda crossed the pavement and entered her waiting car.

Outside, the fog hung like a thick pall over London--thick enough to
curtain the windows of the car with a blank, grey veil and to make
progress through the streets a difficult and somewhat dangerous process.
Magda snuggled into her furs and leant back against the padded cushions.
All sight of the outside world was cut off from her, except for the
blurred gleam of an occasional street-lamp or the menacing shape of a
motor-bus looming suddenly alongside, and she yielded herself to the
train of thought provoked by her talk with Lady Arabella.

In a detached sort of way she felt sorry about Kit Raynham--principally
because Lady Arabella, of whom she was exceedingly fond, seemed vexed
about the matter. It had not taken her long to discover, when as a child
she had come to live with her godmother, the warm heart that concealed
itself beneath the old lady’s somewhat shrewish exterior. And to
Lady Arabella the advent of her god-child had been a matter for pure
rejoicing.

Having no children of her own, she lavished a pent-up wealth of
affection upon Magda of which few would have thought her capable, and
though she was by no means niggardly in her blame of Hugh Vallincourt
for his method of shelving his responsibilities, she was grateful that
his withdrawal into the monastic life had been the means of throwing
Magda into her care. Five years later, when death claimed him, she found
he had appointed her the child’s sole guardian.

True to her intention, she had asked the opinion of Lydia Tchinova, the
famous dancer, and under Madame Tchinova’s guidance Magda had received
such training that when she came to make her debut she leaped into fame
at once. Hers was one of those rare cases where the initial drudgery and
patient waiting that attends so many careers was practically eliminated,
and at the age of twenty she was probably the most talked-of woman in
London.

She had discarded the family surname for professional purposes, and
appeared in public under the name of Wielitzska--“to save the reigning
Vallincourts from a soul convulsion,” as she observed with a twinkle.
During the last year, influenced by the growing demands of her vocation,
she had quitted her godmother’s hospitable roof and established herself
in a house of her own.

Nor had Lady Arabella sought to dissuade her. Although she and Magda
were the best of friends, she had latterly found the onus of chaperoning
her god-child an increasingly heavy burden. As she herself remarked:
“You might as well attempt to chaperon a comet!”

It was almost inevitable that Magda, starred and feted wherever she
went, should develop into a rather erratic and self-willed young person,
but on the whole she had remained singularly unspoilt. Side by side with
her gift for dancing she had also inherited something of her mother’s
sweetness and wholesomeness of nature. There was nothing petty or mean
about her, and many a struggling member of her own profession had had
good cause to thank “the Wielitzska” for a helping hand.

Women found in her a good pal; men, an elusive, provocative personality
that bewitched and angered them in the same breath, coolly accepting all
they had to offer of love and headlong worship--and giving nothing in
return.

It was not in the least that Magda deliberately set herself to wile a
man’s heart out of his body. She seemed unable to help it! Apart from
everything else, her dancing had taught her the whole magic of the art
of charming by every look and gesture, and the passage of time had only
added to the extraordinary physical allure which had been hers even as a
child.

Yet for all the apparent warmth and ardour of her temperament, to which
the men she knew succumbed in spite of themselves, she herself seemed
untouched by any deeper emotion than that of a faintly amused desire
to attract. The lessons of her early days, the tragedy of her mother’s
married life, had permeated her whole being, and her ability to
remain emotionally unstirred was due to an instinctive reserve and
self-withdrawal--an inherent distrust of the passion of love.

_“Take everything. But do not give--anything--in return.”_
Subconsciously Diane’s words, wrested from her at a moment of poignant
mental anguish, formed the credo of her daughter’s life.

No man, so far, had ever actually counted for anything in Magda’s scheme
of existence, and as she drove slowly home from Lady Arabella’s house in
Park Lane she sincerely hoped none ever would. Certainly--she smiled a
little at the bare idea--Kit Raynham was not destined to be the man!
He was clever, and enthusiastic, and adoring, and she liked him quite a
lot, but his hot-headed passion failed to waken in her breast the least
spark of responsive emotion.

Her thoughts drifted idly backward, recalling this or that man who had
wanted her. It was odd, but of all the men she had met the memory of one
alone was still provocative of a genuine thrill of interest--and
that was the unknown artist whom she had encountered in the woods at
Coverdale.

Even now, after the lapse of ten years, she could remember the young,
lean, square-jawed face with the grey eyes, “like eyes with little fires
behind them,” and hear again the sudden jerky note in the man’s voice as
he muttered, “Witch-child!”

That brief adventure with “Saint Michel”--she remembered calling
him “Saint Michel”--stood out as one of the clearest memories of her
childhood. That, and the memory of her mother, kneeling on the big
bearskin rug and saying in a hard, dry voice: “Never give your heart to
any man. Take everything. But do not give--anything--in return.”



CHAPTER II

OUT OF THE FOG

A sudden warning shout, the transient glare of fog-blurred headlights,
then a crash and a staggering blow on the car’s near side which sent
it reeling like a drunken thing, bonnet foremost, straight into a
motor-omnibus.

Magda felt herself pitched violently forward off the seat, striking her
head as she fell, and while the car yet rocked with the force of its
collision with the motor-bus another vehicle drove blindly into it
from the rear. It lurched sickeningly and jammed at a precarious angle,
canted up on two wheels.

Shouts and cries, the frenzied hooting of horns, the grinding of brakes
and clash of splintered glass combined into a pandemonium of terrifying
hubbub.

Magda, half-dazed with shock, crouched on the floor of the car where she
had been flung. She could see the lights appearing and disappearing in
the fog like baleful eyes opening and shutting spasmodically. A tumult
of hoarse cries, cursing and bellowing instructions, crossed by the thin
scream of women’s cries, battered against her ears.

Then out of the medley of raucous noise came a cool, assured voice:

“Don’t be frightened. I’ll get you out.”

Magda was conscious of a sudden reaction from the numbed sense of
bewildered terror which had overwhelmed her. The sound of that unknown
voice--quiet, commanding, and infinitely reassuring--was like a hand
laid on her heart and stilling its terrified throbbing.

She heard someone tugging at the handle of the door. There came a
moment’s pause while the strained woodwork resisted the pull, then with
a scrape of jarring fittings the door jerked open and a man’s figure
loomed in the aperture.

“Where are you?” he asked, peering through the dense gloom. “Ah!” She
felt his outstretched hands close on her shoulders as she knelt huddled
on the floor. “Can you get up? Or are you hurt?”

Magda tested her limbs cautiously, to discover that no bones were
broken, though her head ached horribly, so that she felt sick and giddy
with the pain.

“No, I’m not hurt,” she answered.

“Then come along. The car’s heeled up a bit, but I’ll lift you out if
you can get to the door.”

She stumbled forward obediently, groping her way towards the vague panel
of lighter grey revealed by the open door.

Once more, out of the swathing fog, hands touched her.

“There you are! That’s right. Now lean forward.”

She found herself clasped by arms like steel--so strong, so sure, that
she felt as safe and secure as when Vladimir Ravinski, the amazingly
clever young Russian who partnered her in several of her dances,
sometimes lifted her, lightly and easily as a feather, and bore her
triumphantly off the stage aloft on his shoulder.

“You’re very strong,” she murmured, as the unknown owner of the arms
swung her down from the tilted car.

“You’re not very heavy,” came the answer. There was a kind of laughter
in the voice.

As the man spoke he set her down on her feet, and then, just as Magda
was opening her lips to thank him, the fog seemed to grow suddenly
denser, swirling round her in great murky waves and surging in her ears
with a noise like the boom of the ocean. Higher and higher rose the
waves, a resistless sea of blackness, and at last they swept right over
her head and she sank into the utter darkness of oblivion.



“Drink this!”

Someone was holding a glass to her lips and the pungent smell of sal
volatile pricked her nostrils. Magda shrank back, her eyes still shut,
and pressed her head further into the cushions against which it rested.
She detested the smell of sal volatile.

“Drink it! Do you hear?”

The voice seemed to drive at her with its ring of command. She opened
her eyes and looked straight up into other eyes--dark-grey ones,
these--that were bent on her intently. To her confused consciousness
they appeared to blaze down at her.

“No,” she muttered, feebly trying to push the glass away.

The effort of moving her arm seemed stupendous. Her head swam with it.
The sea of fog came rolling back again, and this time she sank under it
at once.

Then--after an immensity of time, she was sure--she felt herself
struggling up to the surface once more. She was lying rocking gently on
the top of the waves now; the sensation was very peaceful and pleasant.
A little breeze played across her face. She drew in deep breaths of the
cool air, but she did not open her eyes. Presently a murmur of voices
penetrated her consciousness.

“She’s coming round again.” A man was speaking. “Go on fanning her.”

“Poor young thing! She’s had a shaking up and no mistake!” This in a
woman’s voice, very kindly and commiserating. A hand lightly smoothed
the fur of her coat-sleeve. “Looks as if she was a rich young lady. Her
people must be anxious about her.”

Someone laughed a little, softly.

“Oh, yes, she’s a rich enough young lady, Mrs. Braithwaite. Don’t you
know who it is we’ve rescued?”

“I, sir? No. How should I?”

“Then I’ll tell you. This is Mademoiselle Wielitzska, the famous
dancer.”

“Never, sir! Well, I do declare----”

“Now, drink this at once, please.” The man’s voice cut sharply across
the impending flow of garrulous interest, and Magda, who had not
gathered the actual sense of the murmured conversation, felt an arm pass
behind her head, raising it a little, while once more that hateful glass
of sal volatile was held to her lips.

Her eyes unclosed fretfully.

“Take it away,” she was beginning.

“Drink it! Do you hear? Do as you’re told!”

The sharp, authoritative tones startled her into sudden compliance. She
opened her mouth and swallowed the contents of the glass with a gulp.
Then she looked resentfully at the man whose curt command she had obeyed
in such unexpected fashion. Magda Wielitzska was more used to giving
orders than to taking them.

“There, that’s better,” he observed, regarding the empty glass with
satisfaction. “No, lie still”--as she attempted to rise. “You’ll feel
better in a few minutes.”

“I’m better now,” declared Magda sulkily.

Her head was growing clearer every minute. She was even able to feel an
intense irritation against this man who had just compelled her to drink
the sal volatile.

He looked at her unperturbedly.

“Are you? That’s good. Still, you’ll stay where you are till I tell you
that you may get up.” He turned to a comfortable-looking woman who was
standing at the foot of the couch on which Magda lay--a housekeeper of
the nice old-fashioned black-satin kind. “Now, Mrs. Braithwaite, I think
this lady will be glad of a cup of tea by the time you can have one
ready.”

“Very good, sir.”

With a last, admiring glance at the slender figure on the couch the
good woman bustled away, leaving Magda alone with her unknown host and
burning with indignation at the cool way in which he had ordered her to
remain where she was.

He had his back to her for the moment, having turned to poke up the
fire, and Magda raised herself on her elbow, preparatory to getting off
the couch. He swung round instantly.

“I told you to stay where you were,” he said peremptorily.

“I don’t always do as I’m told,” she retorted with spirit.

“You will in this instance, though,” he rejoined, crossing the room
swiftly towards her.

But quick though he was, she was still quicker. Her eyes blazing
defiance, she slipped from the couch and stood up before he could reach
her side. She took a step forward.

“There!” she began defiantly. The next moment the whole room seemed to
swim round her as she tottered weakly and would have fallen had he not
caught her.

“What did I tell you?” he said sharply. “You’re not fit to stand.”

Without more ado he lifted her up in his arms and deposited her again on
the couch.

“I--I only turned a little giddy,” she protested feebly.

“Precisely. Just as I thought you would. Another time, perhaps, you’ll
obey orders.”

He stood looking down at her with curiously brilliant grey eyes. Magda
almost winced under their penetrating glance. She felt as though they
could see into her very soul, and she summoned up all her courage to
combat the man’s strange force.

“I’m not used to obeying orders,” she said impatiently.

“No?”--with complete indifference. “Then it will be a salutary
experience for you. Now, lie still until tea comes. I have a letter to
write.”

He walked away and, seating himself at a desk in the window, appeared to
forget all about her, while his pen travelled swiftly over the sheet of
notepaper he had drawn towards him.

Magda watched him with rebellious eyes. Gradually, however, the
rebellion died out of them, replaced by a puzzled look of interest.
There was something vaguely familiar about the man. Had she ever seen
him before? Or was it merely one of those chance resemblances which one
comes across occasionally? That fair hair with its crisp wave, the lean,
square-jawed face, above all, the dark-grey eyes with their bright,
penetrating glance--why did she feel as though every detail of the face
were already known to her?

She failed to place the resemblance, however, and finally, with a little
sigh of fatigue, she gave up the attempt. Her brain still felt muddled
and confused from the blow she had received. Perhaps later she would be
able to think things out more clearly.

Meanwhile she lay still, her eyes resting languidly on the face that
so puzzled her. It was not precisely a handsome face, but there was a
certain rugged fineness in its lines that lifted it altogether out
of the ruck of the ordinary. It held its contradictions, too.
Notwithstanding the powerful, determined jaw, the mouth had a sensitive
upward curve at the corners which gave it an expression of singular
sweetness, and beneath the eyes were little lines which qualified their
dominating glance with a hint of whimsical humour.

The clock ticked on solemnly. Presently Mrs. Braithwaite bustled in
with the tea and withdrew again. But the man remained absorbed in his
writing, apparently oblivious of everything else.

Magda, who was rapidly recovering, eyed the teapot longingly. She was
just wondering whether she dared venture to draw his attention to its
arrival or whether he would snap her head off if she did, when he looked
up suddenly with that swift, hawk-like glance of his.

“Ready for some tea?” he queried.

She nodded.

“Yes. Am I”--sarcastically--“allowed to get up now?”

He surveyed her consideringly.

“No, I think not,” he said at last. “But as the mountain can’t go to
Mahomet, Mahomet shall come to the mountain.”

He crossed the room and, while Magda was still wondering what he
proposed to do, he stooped and dexterously wheeled the couch with its
light burden close up to the tea-table.

“Now, I’ll fix these cushions,” he said. And with deft hands he
rearranged the cushions so that they should support her comfortably
while she drank her tea.

“You would make a very good nurse, I should think,” commented Magda,
somewhat mollified.

“Thanks,” was all he vouchsafed in answer.

He busied himself pouring out tea, then brought her cup and placed it
beside her on a quaint little table of Chinese Chippendale.

“Mrs. Braithwaite--my housekeeper--is looking after your chauffeur in
the kitchen,” he observed presently. “Possibly you may be interested to
hear”--sarcastically--“that he wasn’t hurt in the smash-up.”

Magda felt herself flushing a little under the implied rebuke--as much
with annoyance as anything else. She knew that she was not really the
heartless type of woman he inferred her to be, to whom the fate of
her dependents was only of importance in so far as it affected her own
personal comfort, and she resented the injustice of his assumption that
she was.

She had been so bewildered and dazed by the suddenness of the accident
and by the blow she herself had received that she had hardly
yet collected her thoughts sufficiently to envisage the possible
consequences to others.

With feminine perverseness she promptly decided that nothing would
induce her to explain matters. If this detestably superior individual
chose to think her utterly heartless and selfish--why, let him think so!

“And the car?” she asked in a tone of deliberate indifference. “That’s
quite as important as the chauffeur.”

“More so, surely?”--with polite irony. “The car, I am sorry to say, will
take a good deal of repairing. At present it’s still in the middle of
the street with red lights fore and aft. It can’t be moved till the fog
lifts.”

“What a nuisance! How on earth am I to get home?”

“There are such things as taxis”--suggestively. “Later, when it clears a
bit, I’ll send out for one.”

“Thanks. I’m afraid I’m giving you a lot of trouble.”

He did not hastily disclaim the idea as most men would have done.

“That can’t be helped,” he returned bluntly.

Magda felt herself colouring again. This man was insufferable!

“Evidently the role of knight-errant is new to you,” she observed.

“Quite true. I’m not in the habit of rescuing damsels in distress. But
how did you guess?”--with interest.

“Because you do it with such a very bad grace,” she flashed at him.

He smiled--and once more Magda was aware of the sense of familiarity
even with that whimsical, crooked smile.

“I see,” he replied composedly. “Then you think I ought to have
been overwhelmed with delight that your car cannoned into my
bus--incidentally I barked my shins badly in the general mix-up--and
that I had to haul you out and bring you round from a faint and so on?”

The question--without trimmings--was unanswerable. But to Magda,
London’s spoiled child, conscious that there were men who would have
given half their fortune for the chance to render a like service, and
then counted themselves amply rewarded by the subsequent hour or two
alone with her, the question was merely provocative.

“Some men would have been,” she returned calmly.

“Ah! Just because you are the Wielitzska, I suppose?”

She stared at him in blank astonishment.

“You knew--you knew who I was all the time?” she gasped.

“Certainly I knew.”

“Then--then----”

“Then why wasn’t I suitably impressed?” he suggested drily.

She sprang to her feet.

“Oh! you are intolerable!” she exclaimed hotly. “You know I didn’t mean
that!”

He regarded her quite placidly.

“You did. That is precisely what you were thinking. Only you funked
putting it into plain words.”

He got up and came to her side and stood looking down at her.

“Isn’t it a fact?” he insisted. “Isn’t it?”

Magda looked up, tried to answer in the negative and failed. He had
spoken the simple truth and she knew it. But none the less she hated him
for it--hated him for driving her up into a corner and trying to force
an acknowledgment from her. She remained obstinately silent.

He turned away with a short, amused laugh.

“So you haven’t even the courage of your convictions,” he commented.

Magda clenched her hands, driving the nails hard into the soft palms of
them. He was an absolute boor, this man who had come to her rescue in
the fog! He was taking a brutal advantage of their relative positions to
speak to her as no man had ever dared to speak to her before. Or woman
either! Even old Lady Arabella would hardly have thrust the naked truth
so savagely under her eyes.

And now he had as good as told her that she was a coward! Well, at least
he should not have the satisfaction of finding he was right in that
respect. She walked straight up to him, her small head held high, in her
dark eyes a smouldering fire of fierce resentment.

“So that is what you think, is it?” she said in a low voice of bitter
anger. “Well, I _have_ the courage of my convictions.” She paused. Then,
with an effort: “Yes, I did think you weren’t ‘suitably impressed,’ as
you put it. You are perfectly right.”

He threw her a swift glance of surprise. Presumably he hadn’t
anticipated such a candid acknowledgment, but even so he showed no
disposition to lay down the probe.

“You didn’t think it possible that anyone could meet the Wielitzska
without regarding the event as a piece of stupendous good luck and being
appropriately overjoyed, did you?” he pursued relentlessly.

Magda pressed her lips together. Then, with an effort:

“No,” she admitted.

“And so, just because I treated you as I would any other woman, and made
no pretence of fatuous delight over your presence here, you supposed I
must be ignorant of your identity? Was that it?”

Magda writhed under the cool, ironical questioning with its undercurrent
of keen contempt. Each word stung like the flick of a lash on bare
flesh. But she forced herself to answer--and to answer honestly.

“Yes,” she said very low. “That was it.”

He shrugged his shoulders and turned away.

“Comment is superfluous, I think.”

She made an impulsive step towards him.

For some unfathomable reason she minded--minded intensely--that this
man should hold her in such poor esteem. She wanted to put herself right
with him, to justify her attitude in his eyes.

“Have you ever seen me dance?” she asked abruptly.

Surely if he had ever seen that wonderful artistry which she knew
was hers, witnessed the half-crazy enthusiasm with which her audience
received her, he would make allowance, judge her a little less harshly
for what was, after all, a very natural assumption on the part of a
stage favourite.

An expression of unwilling admiration came into his eyes.

“Have I seen you dance?” he repeated. “Yes, I have. Several times.”

He did not add--which would have been no more than the truth--that
during her last winter’s season at the Imperial Theatre he had hardly
missed a dozen performances.

“Then--then----” Magda spoke with a kind of incredulous appeal. “Can’t
you understand--just a little?”

“Oh, I understand. I understand perfectly. You’ve been spoilt and
idolised to such an extent that it seems incredible to you to find a man
who doesn’t immediately fall down and worship you.”

Magda twisted her hands together. Once more he was thrusting at her with
the rapier of truth. And it hurt--hurt inexplicably.

“Yes, I believe that’s--almost true,” she acknowledged falteringly.
“But if you understand so well, couldn’t you--can’t you”--with a swift
supplicating smile--“be a little more merciful?”

“No. I--I _hate_ your type of woman!”

There was an undertone of passion in his voice. It was almost as though
he were fighting against some impulse within himself and the fierceness
of the struggle had wrung from him that quick, unvarnished protest.

“Then you despise dancers?”

“Despise? On the contrary, I revere a dancer--the dancer who is
a genuine artist.” He paused, then went on speaking thoughtfully.
“Dancing, to my mind, is one of the most consistent expressions of
beauty. It’s the sheer symmetry and grace of that body which was made in
God’s own likeness developed to the utmost limit of human perfection.
. . . And the dancer who desecrates the temple of his body is punished
proportionately. No art is a harder taskmistress than the art of
dancing.”

Magda listened breathlessly. This man understood--oh, he understood!
Then why did he “hate her type of woman”?

Almost as though he had read her thoughts he pursued:

“As a dancer, an artist--I acknowledge the Wielitzska to be supreme. But
as a woman----”

“Yes? As a woman? Go on. What do you know about me as a woman?”

He laughed disagreeably.

“I’d judge that in the making of you your soul got left out,” he said
drily.

Magda forced a smile.

“I’m afraid I’m very stupid. Do you mind explaining?”

“Does it need explanation?”

“Oh--please!”

“Then--one of my best pals was a man who loved you.”

Magda threw him a glance of veiled mockery from beneath her long white
lids.

“Surely that should be a recommendation--something in my favour?”

His eyes hardened.

“If you had dealt honestly with him, it might have been. But you drew
him on, _made_ him care for you in spite of himself. And then, when
he was yours, body and soul, you turned him down! Turned him
down--pretended you were surprised--you’d never meant anything! All the
old rotten excuses a woman offers when she has finished playing with a
man and got bored with him. . . . I’ve no place for your kind of woman.
I tell you”--his tone deepening in intensity--“the wife of any common
labourer, who cooks and washes and sews for her man day in, day out,
is worth a dozen of you! She knows that love’s worth having and worth
working for. And she works. You don’t. Women like you take a man’s soul
and play with it, and when you’ve defiled and defaced it out of all
likeness to the soul God gave him, you hand it back to him and think you
clear yourself by saying you ‘didn’t mean it’!”

The bitter speech, harsh with the deeply rooted pain and resentment
which had prompted it, battered through Magda’s weak defences and found
her helpless and unarmed. Once she had uttered a faint cry of protest,
tried to check him, but he had not heeded it. After that she had
listened with bent head, her breath coming and going unevenly.

When he had finished, the face she lifted to him was white as milk and
her mouth trembled.

“Thanks. Well, I’ve heard my character now,” she said unsteadily. “I--I
didn’t know anyone thought of me--like that.”

He stared at her--at the drooping lines of her figure, the quivering
lips, at the half-stunned expression of the dark eyes. And suddenly
realisation of the enormity of all he had said seemed to come to him.
But he did not appear to be at all overwhelmed by it.

“I’m afraid I’ve transgressed beyond forgiveness now,” he said curtly.
“But--you rather asked for it, you know, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I think I did--ask for it.” Suddenly she threw up
her head and faced him. “If--if it’s any satisfaction to you to know
it, I think you’ve paid off at least some of your friend’s score.” She
looked at him with a curious, almost piteous surprise. “You--you’ve hurt
me!” she whispered passionately. She turned to the door. “I’ll go now.”

“No!” He stopped her with a hand on her arm, and she obeyed his touch
submissively. For a moment he stood looking down at her with an oddly
conflicting expression on his face. It was as though he were arguing out
some point with himself. All at once he seemed to come to a decision.

“Look, you can’t go till the fog clears a bit. Suppose we call a truce?
Sit down here”--pulling forward a big easy-chair--“and for the rest of
your visit let’s behave as though we didn’t heartily disapprove of one
another.”

Magda sank into the chair with that supple grace of limb which made it
sheer delight to watch her movements.

“I never said I disapproved of you,” she remarked.

He seated himself opposite her, on the other side of the hearth, and
regarded her quizzically.

“No. But you do, all the same. Naturally, you would after my candour!
And I’d rather you did, too,” he added abruptly. “But at least you’ve no
more devoted admirer of your art. You know, dancing appeals to me in a
way that nothing else does. My job’s painting--”

“House-painting?” interpolated Magda with a smile. Her spirits were
rising a little under his new kindliness of manner.

He laughed with sudden boyishness and nodded gaily.

“Why, yes--so long as people continue to cover their wall-space with
portraits of themselves.”

Magda wondered whether he was possibly a well-known painter. But he gave
her no chance to find out, for he continued speaking almost at once.

“I love my art--but a still, flat canvas, however beautifully painted,
isn’t comparable with the moving, living interpretation of beauty
possible to a dancer. I remember, years ago--ten years, quite--seeing
a kiddy dancing in a wood.” Magda leaned forward. “It was the
prettiest thing imaginable. She was all by herself, a little, thin,
black-and-white wisp of a thing, with a small, tense face and eyes like
black smudges. And she danced as though it were more natural to her than
walking. I got her to pose for me at the foot of a tree. The picture
of her was my first real success. So you see, I’ve good reason to be
grateful to one dancer!”

Magda caught her breath. She knew now why the man’s face had seemed so
familiar! He was the artist she had met in the wood at Coverdale the day
Sieur Hugh had beaten her--her _“Saint Michel”_! She was conscious of a
queer little thrill of excitement as the truth dawned upon her.

“What was the picture called?” she asked, forcing herself to speak
composedly.

“‘The Repose of Titania.’”

She nodded. The picture was a very well-known one. Everybody knew by
whom it had been painted.

“Then you must be Michael Quarrington?”

“Yes. So now, we’ve been introduced, haven’t we?”

It seemed almost as if he had repented of his former churlish manner,
and were endeavouring to atone for it. He talked to her about his work
a little, then slid easily into the allied topics of music and books.
Finally he took her into an adjoining room, and showed her a small,
beloved collection of coloured prints which he had gathered together,
recounting various amusing little incidents which had attended the
acquisition of this or that one among them with much gusto and a certain
quaint humour that she was beginning to recognise as characteristic.

Magda, to whom the study of old prints was by no means an unknown
territory, was thoroughly entertained. She found herself enthusing,
discussing, arguing points, in a happy spirit of _camaraderie_ with her
host which, half an hour earlier, she would have believed impossible.

The end came abruptly. Quarrington chanced to glance out of the window
where the street lamps were now glimmering serenely through a clear
dusk. The fog had lifted.

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said shortly. “I was beginning--” He
checked himself and glanced at her with a sudden stormy light in his
eyes.

“Beginning--what?” she asked a little breathlessly. The atmosphere had
all at once grown tense with some unlooked-for stress of emotion.

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes--tell me!”

“I was beginning to forget that you’re the ‘type of woman I hate,’” he
said. And strode out of the room, leaving her startled and unaccountably
shaken.

When he came back he had completely reassumed his former non-committal
manner.

“There’s a taxi waiting for you,” he announced. “It’s perfectly clear
outside now, so I think you will be spared any further adventures on
your way home.”

He accompanied her into the hall, and as they shook hands she murmured a
little diffidently:

“Perhaps we shall meet again some time?”

He drew back sharply.

“No, we shan’t meet again.” There was something purposeful, almost
vehemently so, in the curtly spoken words. “If I had thought that----”

“Yes?” she prompted. “If you had?”

“If I’d thought that,” he said quietly, “I shouldn’t have dared to risk
this last half-hour.”

A momentary silence fell between them. Then, with a shrug, he added
lightly:

“But we shan’t meet again. I’m leaving England next week. That settles
it.”

Without giving her time to make any rejoinder he opened the street-door
and stood aside for her to pass out. A minute later she was in the taxi,
and he was standing bare-headed on the pavement beside it.

“Good-bye,” she said. “Good-bye--_Saint Michel_.”

His hand closed round hers in a grip that almost crushed the slender
fingers.

“_You_!” he cried hoarsely. There was a note of sudden, desperate
recognition in his voice. “_You_!”

As Magda smiled into his startled eyes--the grey eyes that had burned
their way into her memory ten years ago--the taxi slid away into the
lamp-lit dusk.



CHAPTER III

FRIARS’ HOLM

With a grinding of brakes the taxi slowed up and came to a standstill at
Friars’ Holm, the quaint old Queen Anne house which Magda had acquired
in north London.

Once within the high wall enclosing the old-world garden in which it
stood, it was easy enough to imagine oneself a hundred miles from town.
Fir and cedar sentinelled the house, and in the centre of the garden
there was a lawn of wonderful old turf, hedged round in summer by a
riot of roses so that it gleamed like a great square emerald set in a
jewelled frame.

Magda entered the house and, crossing the cheerfully lit hall, threw
open the door of a room whence issued the sound of someone--obviously a
first-rate musician--playing the piano.

As she opened the door the twilight, shot by quivering spears of light
from the fire’s dancing flames, seemed to rush out at her, bearing
with it the mournful, heart-shaking music of some Russian melody. Magda
uttered a soft, half-amused exclamation of impatience and switched on
the lights.

“All in the dark, Davilof?” she asked in a practical tone of voice
calculated to disintegrate any possible fabric of romance woven of
firelight and fifths.

The flood of electric light revealed a large, lofty room, devoid of
furniture except for a few comfortable chairs grouped together at one
end of it, and for a magnificent grand piano at the other. The room
appeared doubly large by reason of the fact that the whole of one wall
was taken up by four immense panels of looking-glass, cleverly fitted
together so that in effect the entire wall was composed of a single
enormous mirror. It was in front of this mirror that Magda practised.
The remaining three walls were hung with priceless old tapestry woven of
sombre green and greys.

As she entered the room a man rose quickly from the piano and came
forward to meet her. There was a kind of repressed eagerness in the
action, as though he had been waiting with impatience for her coming.

He was a striking-looking man, tall, and built with the slender-limbed
grace of a foreigner. Golden-brown hair, worn rather longer than fashion
dictates, waved crisply over his head, and the moustache and small
Vandyck beard which partially concealed the lower part of his face were
of the same warmly golden colour.

The word “musician” was written all over him--in the supple, capable
hands, in the careless stoop of his loosely knit shoulders, and, more
than all, in the imaginative hazel eyes with their curious mixture of
abstraction and fire. They rather suggested lightning playing over some
dreaming pool.

Magda shook hands with him carelessly.

“We shall have to postpone the practice as I’m so late, Davilof,” she
said. “I had a smash-up in the fog. My car ran into a bus--”

“And you are hurt?” Davilof broke in sharply, his voice edged with fear.

“No, no. I was stunned for a minute and then afterwards I fainted, but
I’m quite intact otherwise.”

“You are sure--sure?”

“Quite.” Hearing the keen anxiety in his tone she smiled at him
reassuringly and held out a friendly hand. “I’m all right--really,
Antoine.”

He took the hand in both his.

“Thank God!” he said fervently.

Antoine Davilof had lived so long in England that he spoke without trace
of accent, though he sometimes gave an unEnglish twist to the phrasing
of a sentence, but his quick emotion and the simplicity with which he
made no effort to conceal it stamped him unmistakably as a foreigner.

A little touched, Magda allowed her hand to remain in his.

“Why, Davilof!” She chided him laughingly. “You’re quite absurdly upset
about it.”

“I could not have borne it if you had been hurt,” he declared
vehemently. “You ought not to go about by yourself. It’s horrible to
think of _you_--in a street accident--alone!”

“But I wasn’t alone. A man who was in the other half of the
accident--the motor-bus half--played the good Samaritan and carried me
into his house, which happened to be close by. He looked after me very
well, I assure you.”

Davilof released her hand abruptly. His face darkened.

“And this man? Who was he?” he demanded jealously. “I hate to think of
any man--a stranger--touching you.”

“Nonsense! Would you have preferred me to remain lying in the middle of
the road?”

“You know I would not. But I’d rather some woman had looked after you.
Do you know who the man was?”

“I did not--at first.”

“But you do now. Who was it?”

“No one you know, I think,” she answered provokingly. His eyes flashed.

“Why are you making a mystery about it?” he asked suspiciously. “You’re
keeping something from me! Who was this man? Tell me his name.”

Magda froze.

“My dear Antoine! Why this air of high tragedy?” she said lightly. “And
what on earth has it to do with you who the man was?”

“You know what it has to do with me----”

“With my accompanist?”--raising her brows delicately.

“No!”--with sudden violence--“With the man who loves you! I’m that--and
you know it, Magda! Could I play for you as I do if I did not understand
your every mood and emotion? You know I couldn’t! And then you ask what
it matters to me when some unknown man has held you in his arms,
carried you into his house--kissed you, perhaps, while you were
unconscious!”--his imagination running suddenly riot.

“Stop! You’re going too far!” Magda checked him sharply. “You’re always
telling me you love me. I don’t want to hear it.” She paused, then added
cruelly: “I want you for playing my accompaniments, Davilof. That’s all.
Do you understand?”

His eyes blazed. With a quick movement he stepped in front of her.

“I’m a man--as well as an accompanist,” he said hoarsely. “One day
you’ll have to reckon with the man, Magda!”

There was a new, unaccustomed quality in his voice. Hitherto she had not
taken his ardour very seriously. He was a Pole and a musician, with all
the temperament that might be expected from such a combination, and she
had let it go at that, pushing his love aside with the careless hand of
a woman to whom the incense of men’s devotion has been so freely offered
as to have become commonplace. But now the new ring of determination,
of something unexpectedly dogged in his voice, poignantly recalled the
warning uttered by Lady Arabella earlier in the day.

Magda’s nerve wavered. A momentary panic assailed her. Then she
intuitively struck the right note.

“Ah, Davilof, don’t worry me now--not to-night!” she said appealingly.
“I’m tired. It’s been a bit of a strain--the accident and--and----”

“Forgive me!” In a moment he was all penitence--overwhelmed with
compunction. “Forget it! I’ve behaved like a brute. I ought to have seen
that you were worn out.”

He was beside himself with remorse.

“It’s all right, Antoine.” She smiled forgiveness at him. “Only I
felt--I felt I couldn’t stand any more to-night. I suppose it’s taken it
out of me more than I knew--the shock, and fainting like that.”

“Of course it has. You ought to rest. I wish Mrs. Grey were in.”

“Is she not?”

“No. The maid told me she was out when I came, and she hasn’t returned
yet.”

“She’s been held up by the fog, I expect,” answered Magda. “Never mind.
I’ll sit here--in this big chair--and you shall switch off these glaring
lights and play to me, Antoine. That will rest me better than anything.”

She was a little sorry for the man--trying to make up to him for
the pain she knew she had inflicted a moment before, and there was a
dangerous sweetness in her voice.

Davilof’s eyes kindled. He stooped swiftly and kissed her hand.

“You are too good to me!” he said huskily.

Then, while she lay back restfully in a chair which he heaped with
cushions for her, he played to her, improvising as he played--slow,
dreaming melodies that soothed and lulled but held always an undertone
of passionate appeal. The man himself spoke in his music; his love
pleaded with her in its soft, beseeching cadences.

But Magda failed to hear it. Her thoughts were elsewhere--back with the
man who, that afternoon, had first rescued her and afterwards treated
her with blunt candour that had been little less than brutal. She felt
sore and resentful--smarting under the same dismayed sense of surprise
and injustice as a child may feel who receives a blow instead of an
anticipated caress.

Indulged and flattered by everyone with whom she came in contact, it had
been like a slap in the face to find someone--more particularly someone
of the masculine persuasion--who, far from bestowing the admiration and
homage she had learned to look for as a right, quite openly regarded her
with contemptuous disapproval--and made no bones about telling her so.

His indictment of her had left nothing to the imagination. She felt
stunned, and, for the first time in her life, a little unwilling doubt
of herself assaulted her. Was she really anything at all like the
woman Michael Quarrington had pictured? A woman without heart or
conscience--the “kind of woman he had no place for”?

She winced a little at the thought. It was strange how much she minded
his opinion--the opinion of a man whom she had only met by chance and
whom she was very unlikely ever to meet again. He himself had certainly
evinced no anxiety to renew the acquaintance. And this, too, fretted her
in some unaccountable way.

She could not analyse her own emotions. She felt hurt and angry and
ashamed in the same breath--and all because an unknown man, an absolute
stranger, had told her in no measured terms exactly what he thought of
her!

Only--he was not really quite a stranger! He was the “Saint Michel” of
her childhood days, the man with whom she had unconsciously compared
those other men whom the passing years had brought into her life--and
always to their disadvantage.

The first time she had seen him in the woods at Coverdale was the day
when Hugh Vallincourt had beaten her; she had been smarting with the
physical pain and humiliation of it. And now, this second time they
had met, she had been once more forced to endure that strange and
unaccustomed experience called pain. Only this time she felt as though
her soul had been beaten, and it was Saint Michel himself who had
scourged her.

The door at the far end of the room opened suddenly and a welcome voice
broke cheerfully across the bitter current of her thoughts.

“Well, here I am at last! Has Magda arrived home yet?”

Davilof ceased playing abruptly and the speaker paused on the threshold
of the room, peering into the dusk. Magda rose from her seat by the fire
and switched on one of the electric burners.

“Yes, here I am,” she said. “Did you get held up by the fog, Gillian?”

The newcomer advanced into the circle of light. She was a small, slight
woman, though the furs she was wearing served to conceal the slenderness
of her figure. Someone had once said of her that “Mrs. Grey was a
charming study in sepia.” The description was not inapt. Eyes and hair
were brown as a beechnut, and a scattering of golden-brown freckles
emphasised the warm tints of a skin as soft as velvet.

“Did I get held up?” she repeated. “My dear, I walked miles--miles, I
tell you!--in that hideous fog. And then found I’d been walking entirely
in the wrong direction! I fetched up somewhere down Notting Hill Gate
way, and at last by the help of heaven and a policeman discovered the
Tube station. So here I am. But if I could have come across a taxi I’d
have been ready to _buy_ it, I was so tired!”

“Poor dear!” Magda was duly sympathetic. “We’ll have some tea. You’ll
stay, Davilof?”

“I think not, thanks. I’m dining out”--with a glance at his watch. “And
I shan’t have too much time to get home and change as it is.”

Magda held out her hand.

“Good-bye, then. Thank you for keeping me company till Gillian came.”

There was a sudden sweetness of gratitude in the glance she threw at him
which fired his blood. He caught her hand and carried it to his lips.

“The thanks are mine,” he said in a stifled voice. And swinging round on
his heel he left the room abruptly, quite omitting to make his farewells
to Mrs. Grey.

The latter looked across at Magda with a gleam of mirth in her brown
eyes. Then she shook her head reprovingly.

“Will you never learn wisdom, Magda?” she asked, subsiding into a chair
and extending a pair of neatly shod feet to the fire’s warmth.

Magda laughed a little.

“Well, it won’t be the fault of my friends if I don’t!” she returned
ruefully. “Marraine expended a heap of eloquence over my misdeeds this
afternoon.”

“Lady Arabella? I’m glad to hear it. Though she has about as much chance
of producing any permanent result as the gentleman who occupied his
leisure time in rolling a stone uphill.”

“Cat!” Magda made a small grimace at her. “Ah, here’s some tea!”
 Melrose, known among Magda’s friends as “the perfect butler,” had come
noiselessly into the room and was arranging the tea paraphernalia with
the reverential precision of one making preparation for some mystic
rite. “Perhaps when you’ve had a cup you’ll feel more amiable--that is,
if I give you lots of sugar.”

“What was the text of Lady Arabella’s homily?” inquired Gillian
presently, as she sipped her tea.

“Oh, that boy, Kit Raynham,” replied Magda impatiently. “It appears I’m
blighting his young prospects--his professional ones, I mean. Though I
don’t quite see why an attack of calf-love for me should wreck his work
as an architect!”

“I do--if he spends his time sketching ‘the Wielitzska’ in half a dozen
different poses instead of making plans for a garden city.”

Magda smiled involuntarily.

“Does he do that?” she said. “But how ridiculous of him!”

“It’s merely indicative of his state of mind,” returned Gillian. She
gazed meditatively into the fire. “You know, Magda, I think it will mean
the end of our friendship when Coppertop reaches years of discretion.”

Coppertop was Gillian’s small son, a young person of seven, who owed his
cognomen to the crop of flaming red curls which adorned his round button
of a head.

Magda laughed.

“Pouf! By the time that happens I shall be quite old--and harmless.”

Gillian shook her head.

“Your type is never harmless, my dear. Unless you fall in love, you’ll
be an unexploded mine till the day of your death.”

“That nearly occurred to-day, by the way,” vouchsafed Magda tranquilly.
“In which case,”--smiling--“you’d have been spared any further anxiety
on Coppertop’s account.”

“What do you mean?” demanded Gillian, startled.

“I mean that I’ve had an adventure this afternoon. We got smashed up in
the fog.”

“Oh, my dear! How dreadful! How did it happen?”

“Something collided with the car and shot us bang into a motor-bus, and
then, almost at the same moment, something else charged into us from
behind. So there was a pretty fair mix-up.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before! Was anyone badly hurt? And how did you
get home?” Gillian’s questions poured out excitedly.

“No, no one was badly hurt. I got a blow on the head, and fainted. So a
man who’d been inside the bus we ran into performed the rescuing stunt.
His house was close by, and he carried me in there and proceeded to dose
me with sal volatile first and tea afterwards. He wound up by presenting
me with an unvarnished summary of his opinion of the likes of me.”

There was an unwontedly hard note in Magda’s voice as she detailed the
afternoon’s events, and Gillian glanced at her sharply.

“I don’t understand. Was he a strait-laced prig who disapproved of
dancing, do you mean?”

“Nothing of the sort. He had a most comprehensive appreciation of
the art of dancing. His disapproval was entirely concentrated on
me--personally.”

“But how could it be--since he didn’t know you?”

Magda gave a little grin.

“You mean it would have been quite comprehensible if he _had_ known me?”
 she observed ironically.

The other laughed.

“Don’t be so provoking! You know perfectly well what I meant! You
deserve that I should answer ‘yes’ to that question.”

“Do, if you like.”

“I would--only I happen to know you a good deal better than you know
yourself.”

“What do you know about me, then, that I don’t?”

Gillian’s nice brown eyes smiled across at her.

“I know that, somewhere inside you, you’ve got the capacity for being as
sweet and kind and tender and self-sacrificing as any woman living--if
only something would happen to make it worth while. I wish--I wish to
heaven you’d fall in love!”

“I’m not likely to. I’m in love with my art. It gives you a better
return than love for any man.”

“No,” answered Gillian quietly. “No. You’re wrong. Tony died when we’d
only been married a year. But that year was worth the whole rest of life
put together. And--I’ve got Coppertop.”

Magda leaned forward suddenly and kissed her.

“Dear Gillyflower!” she said. “I’m so glad you feel like that--bless
you! I wish I could. But I never shall. I was soured in the making, I
think”--laughing rather forlornly. “I don’t trust love. It’s the thing
that hurts and tortures and breaks a woman--as my mother was hurt and
tortured and broken.” She paused. “No, preserve me from falling in
love!” she added more lightly. “‘A Loaf of Bread, and Thou beside me in
the Wilderness’ doesn’t appeal to me in the least.”

“It will one day,” retorted Gillian oracularly. “In the meantime you
might go on telling me about the man who fished you out of the smash.
Was he young? And good-looking? Perhaps he is destined to be your fate.”

“He was rather over thirty, I should think. And good-looking--quite. But
he ‘hates my type of woman,’ you’ll be interested to know. So that you
can put your high hopes back on the top shelf again.”

“Not at all,” declared Gillian briskly. “There’s nothing like beginning
with a little aversion.”

Magda smiled reminiscently.

“If you’d been present at our interview, you’d realise that ‘a little
aversion’ is a cloying euphemism for the feeling exhibited by my late
preserver.”

“What was he like, then?”

“At first, because I wouldn’t take the sal volatile--you know how I
detest the stuff!--and sit still where he’d put me like a good little
girl, he ordered me about as though I were a child of six. He absolutely
bullied me! Then it apparently occurred to him to take my moral welfare
in hand, and I should judge he considered that Jezebel and Delilah were
positively provincial in their methods as compared with me.”

“Nonsense! If he didn’t know you, why should he suppose himself
competent to form any opinion about you at all--good, bad, or
indifferent?”

“I don’t know,” replied Magda slowly. Then, speaking with sudden
defiance: “Yes, I do know! A pal of his had--had cared about me some
time or other, and I’d turned him down. That’s why.”

“Oh, Magda!” There was both reproach and understanding in Gillian’s
voice.

Magda shrugged her shoulders.

“Well, if he wanted to pay off old scores on his pal’s behalf, he
succeeded,” she said mirthlessly.

Gillian looked at her in surprise. She had never seen Magda quite like
this before; her sombre eyes held a curious strained look like those of
some wild thing of the forest caught in a trap and in pain.

“And you don’t know who he was--I mean the man who came to your help and
then lectured you?”

“Yes, I do. It was Michael Quarrington, the artist.”

“Michael Quarrington? Why, he has the reputation of being a most
charming man!”

Magda stared into the fire.

“I dare say he might have a great deal of charm if he cared to exert it.
Apparently, however, he didn’t think I was worth the effort.”



CHAPTER IV

IN THE MIRROR ROOM

Shouts of mirth came jubilantly from the Mirror Room as Davilof made his
way thither one afternoon a few days later. The shrill peal of a child’s
laughter rose gaily above the lower note of women’s voices, and when
the accompanist opened the door it was to discover Magda completely
engrossed in giving Coppertop a first dancing lesson, while Gillian sat
stitching busily away at some small nether garments afflicted with rents
and tears in sundry places. Every now and again she glanced up with
softly amused eyes to watch her son’s somewhat unsteady efforts in the
Terpsichorean art.

Coppertop, a slim young reed in his bright green knitted jersey, was
clinging with one hand to a wooden bar attached to the wall which served
Magda for the “bar practice” which constitutes part of every dancer’s
daily work, while Magda, holding his other hand in hers, essayed to
instruct him in the principle of “turning out”--that flexible turning of
the knees towards the side which gives so much facility of movement.

“Point your toes sideways--so,” directed Magda. “This one towards
me--like that.” She stooped and placed his foot in position. “Now, kick
out! Try to kick me!”

Coppertop tried--and succeeded, greeting his accomplishment with shrieks
of delight.

It was just at this moment that Davilof appeared on the scene, pausing
abruptly in the doorway as he caught sight of Magda’s laughing face
bent above the fiery red head. There was something very charming in her
expression of eager, light-hearted abandonment to the fun of the moment.

At the sound of the opening door Coppertop wriggled out of her grasp
like an eel, twisting his lithe young body round to see who the new
arrival might be. His face fell woefully as he caught sight of Davilof.

“Oh, you can’t _never_ have come already to play for the Fairy Lady!” he
exclaimed in accents of dire disappointment.

“Fairy Lady” was the name he had bestowed upon Magda when, very early
in their acquaintance, she had performed for his sole and particular
benefit a maturer edition of the dance she had evolved as a child--the
dance with which she had so much astonished Lady Arabella. Nowadays
it figured prominently on her programmes as “The Hamadryad,” and was
enormously popular.

“It’s not never three o’clock!” wailed Coppertop disconsolately, as
Davilof dangled his watch in front of him.

“I think it is, small son,” interpolated Gillian, gathering together her
sewing materials. “Come along. We must leave the Fairy Lady to practise
now, because she’s got to dance to half the people in London to-morrow.”

“Must I really go?” appealed Coppertop, beseeching Magda with a pair of
melting green eyes.

She dropped a light kiss on the top of his red curls.

“‘Fraid so, Coppertop,” she said. “You wouldn’t want Fairy Lady to dance
badly and tumble down, would you?”

But Coppertop was not to be taken in so easily.

“Huh!” he scoffed. “You _couldn’t_ tumble down--not never!”

“Still, you mustn’t be greedy, Topkins,” urged Magda persuasively.
“Remember all the grown-up people who want me to dance to them! I
can’t keep it all for one little boy.” He stared at her for a moment in
silence. Suddenly he flung his arms round her slender hips, clutching
her tightly, and hid his face against her skirt.

“Oh, Fairy Lady, you are so booful--_so booful_!” he whispered in a
smothered voice. Then, with a big sigh: “But one little boy won’t be
greedy.” He turned to his mother. “Come along, mummie!” he commanded
superbly. And trotted out of the room beside her with his small head
well up.

Left alone, Davilof and Magda smiled across at one another.

“Funny little person, isn’t he?” she said.

The musician nodded.

“Grown-ups might possibly envy the freedom of speech permitted to
childhood,” he said quietly. Then, still more quietly: “‘Fairy Lady, you
are so beautiful!’”

“But you’re not a child, so don’t poach Coppertop’s preserves!” retorted
Magda swiftly. “Let’s get to work, Antoine. I’ll just change into my
practice-kit and then I want to run through the ‘Swan-Maiden’s’ dance.
You fix the lighting.”

She vanished into an adjoining room, while Davilof proceeded to switch
off most of the burners, leaving only those which illumined the space in
front of the great mirror. The remainder of the big room receded into a
grey twilight encircling the patch of luminance.

Presently Magda reappeared wearing a loose tunic of some white silken
material, girdled at the waist, but yet leaving her with perfect freedom
of limb.

Davilof watched her as she came down the long room with the
feather-light, floating walk of the trained dancer, and something leaped
into his eyes that was very different from mere admiration--something
that, taken in conjunction with Lady Arabella’s caustic comments of a
few days ago, might have warned Magda had she seen it.

But with her thoughts preoccupied by the work in hand she failed to
notice it, and, advancing till she faced the great mirror, she executed
a few steps in front of it, humming the motif of _The Swan-Maiden_ music
under her breath.

“Play, Antoine,” she threw at him over her shoulder.

Davilof hesitated, made a movement towards her, then wheeled round
abruptly and went to the piano. A moment later the exquisite, smoothly
rippling music which he had himself written for the Swan-Maiden dance
purled out into the room.

The story of the Swan-Maiden had been taken from an old legend which
told of a beautiful maiden and the youth who loved her.

According to the narrative, the pair were unfortunate enough to incur
the displeasure of the evil fairy Ritmagar, and the latter, in order to
punish them, transformed the maiden into a white swan, thus separating
the hapless lovers for ever. Afterwards, the disconsolate youth,
bemoaning the cruelty of fate, used to wander daily along the shores of
the lake where the maiden was compelled to dwell in her guise of a swan,
and eventually Ritmagar, apparently touched to a limited compassion,
permitted the Swan-Maiden to resume her human form once a day during the
hour immediately preceding sunset. But the condition was attached that
she must always return to the lake ere the sun sank below the horizon,
when she would be compelled to reassume her shape of a swan. Should
she fail to return by the appointed time, death would be the inevitable
consequence.

Every reader of fairy tales--and certainly anyone who knows anything
at all about being in love--can guess the sequel. Comes a day when the
lovers, absorbed in their love-making, forget the flight of time, so
that the unhappy maiden returns to the shore of the lake to find that
the sun has already dipped below the horizon. She falls on her knees,
beseeching the witch Ritmagar for mercy, but no answer is vouchsafed,
and gradually the Swan-Maiden finds herself growing weaker and weaker,
until at last death claims her.

A dance, based upon this legend, had been devised for Magda in
conjunction with Vladimir Ravinski, the brilliant Russian dancer, he
taking the lover’s part, and the whole tragic little drama was designed
to terminate with a solo dance by Magda as the dying Swan-Maiden.
Davilof had written the music for it, and the dance was to be performed
at the Imperial Theatre for the first time the following week.

Davilof played ever more and more softly as the dance drew to its
close. The note of lament sounded with increasing insistence through the
slowing ripple of the accompaniment, and at last, as Magda sank to the
ground in a piteous attitude that somehow suggested both the drooping
grace of a dying swan and the innocence and helplessness of the hapless
maiden, the music died away into silence.

There was a little pause. Then Davilof sprang to this feet.

“By God, Magda! You’re magnificent!” he exclaimed with the spontaneous
appreciation of one genuine artist for another.

Magda raised her head and looked up at him with vague, startled eyes.
She still preserved the pose on which the dance had ceased, and had
hardly yet returned to the world of reality from that magic world into
which her art had transported her.

The burning enthusiasm in Davilof’s excited tones recalled her abruptly.

“Was it good--was it really good?” she asked a little shakily.

“Good?” he said. “It was superb!”

He held out his hands and she laid hers in them without thinking,
allowing him to draw her to her feet beside him.

She stood quite still, breathing rather quickly from her recent
exertions and supported by the close clasp of his hands on hers. Her
lips were a little parted, her slight breast rose and fell unevenly, and
a faint rose-colour glowed beneath the ivory pallor of her skin.

Suddenly Davilof’s grip tightened.

“You beautiful thing!” he exclaimed huskily. “Magda----”

The next moment, with a swift, ungoverned movement, he caught her to him
and was crushing her in his arms.

“Antoine! . . . Let me go!”

But the pressure of her soft, pulsing body against his own sent the
blood racing through his veins. He smothered the words with his mouth
on hers, kissing her breathless with a headlong passion that defied
restraint--slaking his longing for her as a man denied water may at last
slake his thirst at some suddenly discovered pool.

Magda felt herself powerless as a leaf caught up in a whirlwind--swept
suddenly into the hot vehemence of a man’s desire while she was yet
unstrung and quivering from the emotional strain of the Swan-Maiden’s
dance, every nerve of her quickened to a tingling sentience by the
underlying passion of the music.

With an effort she wrenched herself out of his arms and ran from him
blindly into the furthest corner of the room. She had no clear idea of
making for the door, but only of getting away--anywhere--heedless of
direction. An instant later she was standing with her back to the wall,
leaning helplessly against the ancient tapestry that clothed it. In
that dim corner of the vast room her slim figure showed faintly limned
against its blurred greens and greys like that of some pallid statue.

“Go . . . go away!” she gasped.

Davilof laughed triumphantly. Nothing could hold him now. The barriers
of use and habit were down irrevocably.

“Go away?” he said. “No, I’m not going away.”

He strode straight across the space that intervened between them. She
watched his coming with dilated eyes. Her hands, palms downwards, were
pressed hard against the woven surface of the tapestry on either side of
her.

As he approached she shrank back, her whole body taut and straining
against the wall. Then she bent her head and flung up her arms, curving
them to shield her face. Davilof could just see the rounded whiteness
of them, glimmering like pale pearl next the satin sheen of night-black
hair.

With a stifled cry he sprang forward and gripped them in his strong,
supple hands, drawing them down inexorably.

“Kiss me!” he demanded fiercely. “Magda, kiss me!”

She shook her head, struggling for speech.

“No!” she gasped. “No!”

She glanced desperately round, but he had her hemmed in, prisoned
against the wall.

“Kiss me!” he repeated unsteadily. “You--you’d better, Magda.”

“And if I don’t?” she forced the words through her stiff lips.

“But you will!” he said hoarsely. “You will!”

There was a dangerous note in his voice. The man had got beyond the
stage to be played with. In the silence of the room Magda could hear his
laboured breathing, feel his heart leaping against her own soft breast
crushed against his. It frightened her.

“You’ll let me go if I do?” The words seemed to run into each other in
her helpless haste.

“I’ll let you go.”

“Very well.”

Slowly, reluctantly she lifted her face to his and kissed him. But the
touch of her lips on his scattered the last vestige of his self-control.

“My beloved . . . Beloved!”

He seized her roughly in his arms. She felt his kisses overwhelming her,
burning against her closed eyelids, bruising her soft mouth and throat.

“I love you . . . worship you----”

“Let me go!” she cried shrilly, struggling against him. “Let me go--you
promised it!”

He released her, drawing slowly back, his arms falling unwillingly away
from her.

“Oh, yes,” he muttered confusedly. “I did promise.”

The instant she felt his grip relax, Magda sprang forward and switched
on the centre burners, flooding the room with a blaze of light, and in
the sudden glare she and Davilof stood staring silently at each other.

With the springing up of the lights it was as though a spell had broken.
The strained, hunted expression left Magda’s face. She wasn’t frightened
any longer. Davilof was no more the man whose sudden passion had surged
about her, threatening to break down all defences and overwhelm her.
He was just Davilof, her accompanist, who, like half the men of her
acquaintance, was more or less in love with her and who had overstepped
the boundary which she had very definitely marked out between herself
and him.

She regarded him stormily.

“Have you gone mad?” she asked contemptuously.

He returned her look, his eyes curiously brilliant. Then he laughed
suddenly.

“Mad?” he said. “Yes, I think I _am_ mad. Mad with love for you!
Magda”--he came and stood close beside her--“don’t send me away! Don’t
say you can’t care for me! You don’t love me now--but I could teach
you.” His voice deepened. “I love you so much. Oh, sweetest!--_Soul_ of
me! Love is so beautiful. Let me teach you how beautiful it is!”

Magda drew back.

“No,” she said. The brief negative fell clear and distinct as a bell.

“I won’t take no,” he returned hotly. “I won’t take no. I want you.
Good God! Don’t you understand? My love for you isn’t just a boy’s
infatuation that you can dismiss with a word. It’s all of me. I worship
you! Haven’t I been with you day after day, worked with you, followed
your every mood--shared your very soul with you? You’re mine! Mine,
because I understand you. You’ve shown me all you thought, all you felt.
You couldn’t have done that if I hadn’t meant something to you.”

“Certainly you meant something to me. You meant an almost perfect
accompanist. Why should you have imagined you meant more? I gave you no
reason to think so.”

“_No reason_?”

It was as though the two short words were the key which unlocked the
floodgates of some raging torrent. Magda could never afterwards recall
the words he used. She only knew they beat upon her with the cruel,
lancinating sharpness of hail driven by the wind.

She had treated him much as other men, evoking the love of his ardent
temperament by that subtle witchery which was second nature to her and
which can be such a potent weapon in the hands of a woman whose own
emotions remain untouched. And now the thwarted passion of the lover and
the savage anger of a man who felt himself deceived and duped broke over
her in a resistless storm--an outburst so bitter and so trenchant
that for the moment she remained speechless before it, buffeted into
helpless, resentful silence. When he ceased, he had stripped her of
every rag of feminine defence.

“Have you finished?” she asked in a stifled voice.

She made no attempt to palliate matters or to refute anything he had
said. In his present frame of mind it would have been useless pointing
out to him that she had treated him no differently from other men. He
was a Pole, and he had caught fire where others would merely have glowed
smoulderingly.

“Yes,” he rejoined sullenly. “I’ve finished.”

“So much the better.”

He regarded her speculatively.

“What are you made of, I wonder? Does it mean nothing to you that a man
has given you his very best--all that he has?”

She appeared to reflect a moment.

“I’m afraid it doesn’t. There’s only one thing really means much to
me--and that is my art. And Lady Arabella,” she added after a pause.
“She’ll always mean a good deal.”

She sat down by the fire and held out her hands to its warmth. The
slender fingers seemed almost transparent, glowing rosily in the
firelight. Davilof turned to go.

“Good-bye, then,” he said curtly.

“Good-bye.” Magda nodded indifferently. Then, carelessly: “I shall want
you to-morrow, Davilof--same time.”

He swung round.

“I will never play for you again. Did you imagine I should?”

She smiled at him--that slow, subtle smile of hers with its hint of
mockery.

“You won’t be able to keep away,” she replied.

“I will never play for you again,” he repeated. “Never! I will teach
myself to hate you.”

She shook her head lightly.

“Impossible, Davilof.”

“It’s not impossible. There’s very little difference between love and
hate--sometimes. And I want all or nothing.”

“I’m afraid it must be nothing, then.”

“We shall see. But if I can’t have you, _I_ swear no other man shall!”

She glanced up at him, lifting her brows a little.

“Aren’t you going too far, Antoine? You can hate me, if you like, or
love me--it’s a matter of indifference to me which you do. But I don’t
propose to allow you to arrange my life for me. And in any case”--after
a moment--“I’m not likely to fall in love--with you or anyone else.”

“You think not?” He stood looking down at her sombrely. “You’ll fall in
love right enough some day. And when you do it will be all or nothing
with you, too. You’re that kind. Love will take you--and break you,
Magda.”

He spoke slowly, with an odd kind of tensity. To Magda it seemed almost
as if his quiet speech held the gravity of prophecy, and she shivered a
little.

“And when that time comes, then you’ll come back to me,” he added.

Magda threw up her head, defying him.

“You propose to be waiting round to pick up the pieces, then?” she
suggested nonchalantly.

But only the sound of the closing door answered her. Davilof had gone.



CHAPTER V

THE SWAN-MAIDEN

Lady Arabella was in her element. She had two brilliant and unattached
young men dining with her--one, Michael Quarrington, a lion in the
artistic world, and the other, Antoine Davilof, who showed unmistakable
symptoms of developing sooner or later into a lion in the musical world.

It was Davilof who was responsible for the artist’s presence at Lady
Arabella’s dinner table. She had expressed--in her usual autocratic
manner--a wish that he should be presented to her, and had determined
upon the evening of the first performance of _The Swan-Maiden_ as the
appointed time.

Davilof appeared doubtful, and declared that Quarrington was leaving
England and had already fixed the date of his departure.

“He’s crossing from Dover the very day before the one you want him to
dine with you,” he told her.

But Lady Arabella swept his objections aside with regal indifference.

“Crossing, is he?” she snapped. “Well, tell him I want him to dine here
and go to the show with us afterwards. He’ll cross the day _after_,
you’ll find--if he crosses at all!” she wound up enigmatically.

So it came about that her two lions, the last-arrived artist and the
soon-to-arrive musician, were both dining with her on the appointed
evening.

Lady Arabella adored lions. Also, notwithstanding her seventy years, she
retained as much original Eve in her composition as a girl of seventeen,
and she adored young men.

In particular, she decided that she approved of Michael Quarrington. She
liked the clean English build of him. She liked his lean, square jaw and
the fair hair with the unruly kink in it which reminded her of a certain
other young man--who had been young when she was young--and to whom
she had bade farewell at her parents’ inflexible decree more than fifty
years ago. Above all, she liked the artist’s eyes--those grey, steady
eyes with their look of reticence so characteristic of the man himself.

Reticence was an asset in her ladyship’s estimation. It showed good
sense--and it offered provocative opportunities for a battle of wits
such as her soul loved.

“Have you seen my god-daughter dance, Mr. Quarrington?” she asked him.

“Yes, several times.”

His tone was non-committal and she eyed him sharply.

“Don’t admire dancing, do you?” she threw at him.

Quarrington regarded her with a humorous twinkle.

“And I an artist? How can you ask, Lady Arabella?”

“Well, you sounded supremely detached,” she grumbled.

“I think Mademoiselle Wielitzska’s dancing the loveliest thing I have
ever seen,” he returned simply.

The old woman vouchsafed him a smile.

“Thank you,” she answered. “I enjoyed that quite as much as I used to
enjoy being told I’d a pretty dimple when I was a girl.”

“You have now,” rejoined Quarrington audaciously.

Lady Arabella’s eyes sparkled. She loved a neatly turned compliment.

“Thank you again. But it’s a pity to waste your pretty speeches on an
old woman of seventy.”

“I don’t,” retorted the artist gravely. “I reserve them for the young
people I know of that age.”

She laughed delightedly. Then, turning to Davilof, she drew him into the
conversation and the talk became general.

Later, as they were all three standing in the hall preparatory to
departure, she flashed another of her sudden remarks at Quarrington.

“I understand you came to my god-daughter’s rescue in that bad fog last
week?”

The quiet grey eyes revealed nothing.

“I was privileged to be some little use,” he replied lightly.

“I hardly gathered you regarded it as a privilege,” observed her
ladyship drily.

The shaft went home. A fleeting light gleamed for a moment in the grey
eyes. Davilof was standing a few paces away, being helped into his coat
by a man-servant, and Quarrington spoke low and quickly.

“She told you?” he said. There was astonishment--resentment, almost--in
his voice.

“No, no.” Lady Arabella, smiling to herself, reassured him hastily. “It
was a shot in the dark on my part. Magda never confides details. She
hands you out an unadorned slice of fact and leaves you to interpret it
as you choose. But if you know her rather well--as I do--and can add two
and two together and make five or any unlikely number of them, why, then
you can fill in some of the blanks for yourself.”

She glanced at him with impish amusement as she moved towards the door.

“Come along, Davilof,” she said. “I suppose you want to hear your own
music--even if Magda’s dancing no longer interests you?”

Davilof gave her his arm down the steps.

“What do you mean, miladi?” he asked. “There is no more beautiful
dancing in the world.”

“Then why have you jacked up your job of accompanist? Shoes beginning to
pinch a little, eh?”--shrewdly.

“You mean I grow too big for my boots? No, madame. If I were the
greatest musician in Europe, instead of being merely Antoine Davilof,
it could only be a source of pride to be asked to accompany the
Wielitzska.”

Lady Arabella paused on the pavement, her foot on the step of the
limousine.

“Then how is it that Mrs. Grey accompanies her now? She was playing for
her at the Duchess of Lichbrooke’s the other evening.

“Magda didn’t tell you, then?”

“No, she didn’t; or I’d not be wasting my breath in asking you. I asked
her, and she said you had taken to playing wrong notes.”

A faint smile curved the lips above the small golden beard.

“Then it must be true. Undoubtedly I played wrong notes, miladi.”

“Very careless of you, I’m sure.” Under the garish light of a
neighbouring street-lamp her keen old eyes met his significantly.
“Or--very imprudent, Davilof. You need the tact of the whole Diplomatic
Service to deal with Magda. And you ought to know it.”

“True, miladi. But I was not designed for diplomacy, and a man can only
use the weapons heaven has given him.”

“I wouldn’t have suggested heaven as invariably the source of your
inspirations,” retorted Lady Arabella. And hopped into the car.

They arrived at the Imperial Theatre to find Mrs. Grey already seated in
Lady Arabella’s box. Someone else was there, too--old Virginie, with her
withered-apple cheeks and bright brown, bird-like eyes, still active
and erect and very little altered from the Virginie of ten years before.
Just as she had devoted herself to Diane, so now she devoted herself
to Diane’s daughter, and no first performance of a new dance of the
Wielitzska’s took place without Virginie’s presence somewhere in the
house. To-night, Lady Arabella had invited her into her box and Virginie
was a quivering bundle of excitement. She rose from her seat at the back
of the box as the newcomers entered.

“Sit down, Virginie.” Lady Arabella nodded kindly to the Frenchwoman.
“And pull your chair forward. You’ll see nothing back there, and there
is plenty of room for us all.”

“_Merci, madame. Madame est bien gentille._” Virginie’s voice was
fervent with ecstatic gratitude as she resumed her seat and waited
expectantly for Magda’s appearance.

Other dances, performed principally by lesser lights of the company and
affording only a briefly tantalising glimpse of Magda herself, preceded
the chief event of the evening. But at last the next item on the
programme read as _The Swan-Maiden (adapted from an Old Legend)_, and
a tremour of excitement, a sudden hush of eager anticipation, rippled
through the audience like wind over grass.

Slowly the heavy silken curtains drew to either side of the stage,
revealing a sunlit glade. In the background glimmered the still waters
of a lake, while at the foot of a tree, in an attitude of tranquil
repose, lay the Swan-Maiden--Magda. One white, naked arm was curved
behind her head, pillowing it, the other lay lightly across her body,
palm upward, with the rosy-tipped fingers curled inwards a little, like
a sleeping child’s. She looked infinitely young as she lay there, her
slender, pliant limbs relaxed in untroubled slumber.

Lady Arabella, with Quarrington sitting next to her in the box, heard
the quick intake of his breath as he leaned suddenly forward.

“Yes, it has quite a familiar look,” she observed. “Reminds me of your
‘Repose of Titania.’”

His eyes flickered inquiringly over her face, but it was evident that
hers had been merely a chance remark. The old lady had obviously no idea
as to who it was who had posed for the Titania of the picture. That was
one of the “slices of fact” which Magda had omitted to hand out when
recounting her adventure in the fog to her godmother. Quarrington leaned
back in his chair satisfied.

“It’s not unlike,” he agreed carelessly.

Then the entrance of Vladimir Ravinski, the lovelorn youth of the
legend, riveted his attention on the stage.

The dance which followed was exquisite. The Russian was a beautiful
youth, like a sun-god with his flying yellow locks and glorious symmetry
of body, and the _pas de deux_ between him and Magda was a thing to
marvel at--sweeping through the whole gamut of love’s emotion, from
the first shy, delicate hesitancy of worshipping boy and girl to the
rapturous abandon of mated lovers.

Then across the vibrant, pulsating scene fell the deadly shadow of the
witch Ritmagar. The stage darkened, the violins in the orchestra skirled
eerily in chromatic showers of notes, and the hunched figure of Ritmagar
approaching menaced the lovers. A wild dance followed, the lovers now
kneeling and beseeching the evil fairy to have pity on them, now rushing
despairingly into each other’s arms, while the witch’s own dancing held
all of threat and malevolence that superb artistry could infuse into it.

The tale unfolded itself with the inevitableness of preordained
catastrophe.

Ritmagar declines to be appeased. She raises her claw-like hand,
pointing a crooked finger at the lovers, and with a clash of brazen
sound and the dull thrumming of drums the whole scene dissolves into
absolute darkness. When the darkness lifts once more, the stage is
empty save for a pure white swan which sails slowly down the lake and
disappears. . . . Followed a solo dance by Ravinski in which he gave
full vent to the anguish of the bereft lover, while now and again the
swan swam statelily by him. At length the witch appeared once more and,
yielding to his impassioned entreaties, declared that the Swan-Maiden
might reassume her human form during the hour preceding sunset,
and Magda--the Swan-Maiden released from enchantment for the time
being--came running in on the stage.

This love-duet was resumed and presently, when the lovers had made their
exit, Ritmagar was seen gleefully watching while the red sun dropped
slowly down the sky, sinking at last below the rim of the lake.

Then a low rumble of drums muttered as she stole from the stage,
the personification of vindictive triumph, and all at once the great
concourse of people in the auditorium seemed to strain forward,
conscious that the climax of the evening, the wonderful solo dance by
the Wielitzska, was about to begin.

The moon rose on the left, and Magda, a slim white figure in her dress
which cleverly suggested the plumage of a swan, floated on to the
stage with that exquisite, ethereal lightness of movement which
only toe-dancing--and toe-dancing of the most perfectly finished
quality--seems able to convey. It was as though her feet were not
touching the solid earth at all. The feather-light drifting of blown
petals; the swaying grace of a swan as it glides along the surface of
the water; the quivering, spirit-like flight of a butterfly--it seemed
as though all these had been caught and blended together by the dancer.

The heavier instruments of the orchestra were silenced, but the rippling
music of the strings wove and interwove a dreaming melody, unutterably
sweet and appealing, as the Swan-Maiden, bathed in pallid moonlight,
besought the invisible Ritmagar for mercy, praying that she might not
die even though the sun had set. . . . But there comes no answer to
her prayers. A sombre note of stern denial sounds in the music, and the
Swan-Maiden yields to utter despair, drooping slowly to earth. Just
as Death himself claims her, her lover, demented with anguish, comes
rushing to her side, and turning towards him as she lies dying upon
the ground, she yields to his embrace with a last gesture of passionate
surrender.



Slowly the heavy curtains swung together, hiding the limp, lifeless body
of the Swan-Maiden and the despairing figure of her lover as he knelt
beside her, and after a breathless pause, the great audience, carried
away by the tragic drama of the dance, its passion and its pathos, broke
into a thunder of applause that rolled and reverberated through the
theatre.

Again and again Magda and her partner were called before the curtain,
the former laden with the sheafs of flowers which had been handed up
on to the stage. But the audience refused to be satisfied until at last
Magda appeared alone, standing very white and slender under the blaze
of lights, a faint suggestion of fatigue in the poise of her lissome
figure.

Instantly the applause broke out anew--thunderous, overwhelming. Magda
smiled, then held out her arms in a little disarming gesture of appeal,
touching in its absolute simplicity. It was as though she said: “Dear
people, I love you all for being so pleased, but I’m very, very tired.
Please, won’t you let me go?”

So they let her go, with one final round of cheers and clapping, and
then, as the curtains fell together once more and the orchestra slid
unobtrusively into the _entr’acte_ music, a buzz of conversation arose.

Michael Quarrington turned and spoke to Davilof as they stood together.

“This will be my last memory of England for some time to come.
Mademoiselle Wielitzska is very wonderful. As much actress as
dancer--and both rather superlatively.”

There was an odd note in Quarrington’s voice, as if he were forcibly
repressing some less measured form of words.

Davilof glanced at him sharply.

“You think so?” he said curtly.

The musician’s hazel eyes were burning feverishly. One hand was clenched
on the back of the chair from which he had just risen; the other hung at
his side, the fingers opening and shutting nervously.

Quarrington smiled.

“Don’t you?”

The eyes of the two men met, and Michael became suddenly conscious that
the other was struggling in the grip of some strong emotion. He could
even sense its atmosphere of antagonism towards himself.

“I think”--Davilof spoke with slow intensity--“I think she’s a soulless
piece of devil’s mechanism.” And turning abruptly, he swung out of the
box, slamming the door behind him.

Quarrington frowned. With his keen perceptions it was not difficult for
him to divine what lay at the back of Davilof’s bitter criticism. The
man was in love--hopelessly in love with the Wielitzska. Probably she
had turned him down, as she had turned down better men than he, but he
had been unable to resist the bitter-sweet temptation of watching her
dance, and throughout the evening had almost certainly been suffering
the torments of the damned.

The artist smiled a little grimly to himself, remembering the many
evenings he, too, had spent at the Imperial Theatre, drawn thither by
the magnetism of a white, slender woman with night-black hair, whose
long, dark eyes haunted him perpetually, even coming between him and his
work.

And then, just as he had made up his mind to go away, first to Paris and
afterwards to Spain or perhaps even further afield, and thus set as many
miles of sea and land as he could betwixt himself and the “kind of woman
he had no place for,” fate had played him a trick and sent her out of
the obscurity of the fog-ridden street straight to his very hearth and
home, so that the fragrance and sweetness and charm of her must needs
linger there to torment him.

He thought he could make a pretty accurate guess at the state of
Davilof’s feelings, and was ironically conscious of a sense of
fellowship with him.

Lady Arabella’s sharp voice cut across his reflections.

“I don’t care for this next thing,” she said, flicking at her programme.
“Mrs. Grey and I are going round to see Magda. Will you come with us?”

Quarrington had every intention of politely excusing himself. Instead of
which he found himself replying:

“With pleasure--if Mademoiselle Wielitzska won’t think I’m intruding.”

Lady Arabella chuckled.

“Well, she intruded on you that day in the fog, didn’t she? So you’ll
be quits.” She glanced impatiently round the box. “Where on earth has
Davilof vanished to? Has he gone up in flame?”

Michael laughed involuntarily.

“Something of the kind, I fancy,” he replied. “Anyway, he departed
rather hurriedly.”

“Poor Antoine!” Gillian spoke with a kind of humorous compassion. “He
has a temperament. I’m glad I haven’t.”

“You have the best of all temperaments, Mrs. Grey,” answered Michael, as
they both followed Lady Arabella out of the box.

She looked at him inquiringly.

“The temperament that understands other people’s temperaments,” he
added.

“How do you know?” she asked, smiling.

Lady Arabella was prancing on ahead down the corridor, and for the
moment Michael and Gillian were alone.

“We artists learn to look for what lies below the surface. If your work
is sincere, you find when you’ve finished a portrait that the soul of
the sitter has revealed itself unmistakably.”

Gillian nodded.

“I’ve been told you’ve an almost diabolical genius for expressing
just what a man or woman is really like--in character, I mean--in your
portraits.”

“I can’t help it,” he said simply. “It comes--it reveals itself--if you
paint sincerely.”

“And do you--always paint sincerely?”

He laughed.

“I try to. Though once I got hauled over the coals pretty sharply for
doing so. My sitter happened to be a pretty society woman, possessed
of about as much soul as would cover a threepenny-bit, and when I’d
finished her portrait she simply turned and rent me. ‘I wanted a taking
picture,’ she informed me indignantly, ‘not the bones of my personality
laid bare for public inspection.’”

They were outside Magda’s dressing-room by this time, and Virginie, who
had flown to her nurseling the moment the dance was at an end, opened
the door in response to Lady Arabella’s preemptory knock. Gillian paused
a moment before entering the room.

“Yours is a wonderful gift of perception,” she said quietly. “It ought
to make you--very merciful.”

Michael looked at her swiftly. Her eyes seemed to be asking something
of him--entreating. But before he could speak Lady Arabella’s voice
interposed remorselessly.

“Come in, you two; and for goodness’ sake shut the door. There’s draught
enough to waft one to heaven.”

There was no choice but to obey, and silently Quarrington followed Mrs.
Grey into the room.



CHAPTER VI

MICHAEL CHANGES HIS MIND

Magda’s dressing-room at the Imperial Theatre was something rather
special in the way of dressing-rooms. It had been designed expressly
for her by the management, and boasted a beautifully appointed bathroom
adjoining it where she could luxuriate in a refreshing dip immediately
after the strain and fatigue of her work on the stage.

She had been very firm about the bathroom, airily dismissing a plaintive
murmur from the manager to the effect that they were “somewhat crowded
for space at the Imperial.”

“Then take another theatre, my dear man,” she had told him. “Or build!
Or give the _corps de ballet_ one less dressing-room amongst them.
But if you want _me_, I must have a bathroom. If I dance, I bathe
afterwards. If not, I don’t dance.”

Being a star of the first magnitude, the Wielitzska could dictate her
own terms, and accordingly a bathroom she had.

She had just emerged from its white-tiled, silver-tapped luxury a
few minutes before Lady Arabella, together with Gillian and Michael
Quarrington, presented themselves at her dressing-room door, and they
found her ensconced in an easy-chair by the fire, sipping a cup of
steaming hot tea.

“I’ve brought Mr. Quarrington to see you,” announced Lady Arabella. “I
thought perhaps you’d like some other congratulations besides family
ones.”

“Am I permitted?” asked Quarrington, taking the hand Magda held out to
him. “Or are you too tired to be bothered with an outsider?”

Magda looked up at him.

“I’ve very glad to see you,” she said quietly.

She appeared unwontedly sweet and girlish as she sat there, clad in a
negligee of some soft silken stuff that clung about the lissom lines of
her figure, and with her satiny hair coiled in a simple knot at the nape
of her neck. There was little or nothing about her to remind one of the
successful ballerina, and Michael found himself poignantly recalling
the innocent, appealing charm of the Swan-Maiden. It was difficult to
associate this woman with that other who had so unconsciously turned
down his pal--the man who had loved her.

“Well? Did it go all right?”

Magda’s eyes sought Gillian’s eagerly as she put the question.

“Did it go?” Mrs. Grey’s voice held all the unqualified enthusiasm any
artiste could desire.

“Oh, Magda! It was wonderful! The most wonderful, beautiful dance I’ve
ever seen.”

“And you know it as well as we do,” interpolated Lady Arabella tartly,
but smiling pridefully in spite of herself.

“Still, of course, she likes to hear us _say_ it.” Gillian championed
her friend stoutly.

“The whole world will be saying it to-morrow,” observed Quarrington
quietly.

Here Virginie created a diversion by handing round cups of freshly
brewed tea.

“You’ll get nerves--drinking tea at this hour of the night,” commented
Lady Arabella, accepting a cup with alacrity, nevertheless.

“I take it very weak,” protested Magda, smiling faintly. “It’s the only
thing I like after dancing.”

But Lady Arabella was already deep in conversation with Gillian and
Virginie--a conversation which resolved itself chiefly into a laudatory
chorus regarding the evening’s performance. In the background Magda’s
maid moved quietly to and fro, carefully putting away her mistress’s
dancing dresses. For the moment Michael and Magda were to all intents
and purposes alone.

“I shall not easily forget to-night,” he said rather low, drawing a
chair up beside her.

“You liked it, then?” she asked hesitatingly--almost shyly.

“‘Like’ is hardly the word.”

Magda flashed him a swift glance.

“And yet,” she said slowly, “I’m the ‘type of woman you hate.’”

“You make it rather difficult to maintain the point of view,” he
admitted.

She was silent a moment.

“You were very unkind to me that day,” she said at last.

Their eyes met and in hers was something soft and dangerously disarming.
Quarrington got up suddenly from his chair.

“Perhaps I was unkind to you so that I might not be unkind to myself,”
 he replied curtly.

Magda’s soft laugh rippled out.

“But how selfish! And--and aren’t you being rather mysterious?”

“Am I?” he returned pointedly. “Surely self-preservation is the first
instinct of the human species?”

She picked up the challenge and tossed it lightly back to him.

“Is the danger, then, very great?”

“I think it is. So, like a wise man, I propose to avoid it.”

“How?”

“Why, by quitting the danger zone. I go to Paris to-morrow.”

“To Paris?”

Magda experienced a sudden feeling of blankness. It was inexplicable,
but somehow the knowledge that Quarrington was going away seemed to take
all the savour out of things. It was only by a supreme effort that she
contrived to keep her tone as light and unconcerned as his own as she
continued:

“And then--after Paris?”

“After Paris? Oh, Spain possibly. Or the Antipodes!”--with a short
laugh.

“Who’s talking about the Antipodes?” suddenly chimed in Lady Arabella.
“Home to bed’s my next move. Gillian, you come with me--the car can take
you on to Hampstead after dropping me in Park Lane. And Virginie can
drive back with Magda.”

“Yes, do go with Marraine,” said Magda, nodding acquiescence in reply to
Gillian’s glance of interrogation. “I have to dress yet.”

There was a general move towards the door.

“Good-bye”--Magda’s slim hand lay for a moment in Quarrington’s. “I--I’m
sorry you’re going away, Saint Michel.”

Only Michael heard the last two words, uttered in that _trainante_,
slightly husky voice that held so much of music and appeal. He turned
abruptly and made his way out of the room in the wake of Gillian and
Lady Arabella.

“You’d better postpone your visit to the Antipodes, Mr. Quarrington,”
 said the latter, as presently they all three stood together in the
vestibule, halted by the stream of people pouring out from the theatre.
“I’m giving a dinner-party next week, with a ‘crush’ to follow. Stay and
come to it.”

“It’s awfully kind of you, Lady Arabella, but I’m afraid it’s
impossible.”

“Fiddlesticks! You’re a free agent, aren’t you?”--looking at him keenly.

A whimsical light gleamed for an instant in the grey eyes.

“I sometimes wonder if I am,” he returned.

“There’s only one cord I know of that can’t be either unknotted--or cut.
And that’s lack of money. That’s not your complaint”--significantly.

“No.”

“So you’ll come?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Magda has promised to dance for me,” proceeded Lady Arabella, entirely
disregarding his quietly uttered negative. “They’re not giving _The
Swan-Maiden_ that night at the Imperial. She can’t dine, of course, poor
dear. Really, dancers have a lot to put up with--or rather, to put up
_without_! Magda never dares to enjoy a good square meal. Afraid of
getting fat, of course! After all, a dancer’s figure’s her fortune.”

Like a low, insistent undertone beneath the rattle of Lady Arabella’s
volubility Michael could hear again the murmur of a soft, dragging
voice: “I’m sorry you’re going away, Saint Michel.”

It seemed almost as though Lady Arabella, with that uncanny shrewdness
of hers, divined it.

“You’ll come, then?” She smiled at him over her shoulder, moving forward
as the crush in the vestibule lessened a little.

And Michael, with an odd expression in his eyes, answered suddenly:

“Yes, I’ll come.”



Later, as Lady Arabella and Gillian drove home together, the former
laughed quietly. There was an element of pride and triumph in the
laughter. Probably the hen who has reared a duckling and sees it sail
off into the water experiences, alongside her natural apprehension and
astonishment, a somewhat similar pride in the startling proclivities
evinced by her nurseling.

“That nice artist-man is in love with Magda,” crowed Lady Arabella
contentedly.

Gillian smiled.

“Do you think so?”

“I do. Only it’s very much against his will, for some reason or other.
Crossing from Dover to-morrow, forsooth!”--with a broad smile. “Not he!
He’ll be at my party--and asking Magda to marry him before the week’s
out, bar accidents! . . . After all, it’s not surprising that the men
are falling over each other to marry her. She’s really rather wonderful.
Where do you think she gets it all from, Gillian, my dear? Not from the
Vallincourts, I’ll swear!”--chuckling.

Mrs. Grey shook her head.

“I don’t know. But I think Magda is a standing argument in favour of the
doctrine of reincarnation! She always seems to me to be a kind of modern
embodiment of Helen of Troy or Cleopatra.”

“Only without the capacity for falling in love! She’s as chilly as an
iceberg and yet somehow gives you the idea she’s all fire and passion.
No wonder the men get misled, poor lambs!”

“She’s not cold, really,” asserted Gillian positively. “Of that I’m
sure. No one could dance as she does--and be an iceberg.”

Lady Arabella chuckled again, wickedly.

“A woman who can dance like that ought to be preceded through life by
a red flag. She positively stirs my old blood--that’s been at a
comfortably tepid temperature for the last thirty years!”

“Some day,” said Gillian, “she’ll fall in love. And then--”

“Then there’ll be fireworks.”

Lady Arabella completed the sentence briskly just as the car pulled up
in front of her house. She skipped nimbly out on to the pavement.

“Fireworks, my dear,” she repeated emphatically. “And a very fine
display, too! Good-night.”

The car slid away north with Gillian inside it reflecting rather
ruefully upon the very great amount of probability contained in Lady
Arabella’s parting comment.



CHAPTER VII

THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Lady Arabella’s big rooms were filling rapidly. The dinner to which only
a few of the elect had been bidden was over, and now those who had been
invited to the less exclusive reception which was to follow were eagerly
wending their way towards Park Lane.

The programme for the evening promised to be an attractive one. A solo
from Antoine Davilof, Lady Arabella’s pet lion-cub of the moment; a song
from the leading operatic tenor; and afterwards a single dance by the
Wielitzska--who could never be persuaded to perform at any other private
houses than those of her godmother and the Duchess of Lichbrooke--the
former’s half sister. So, in this respect, Lady Arabella enjoyed almost
a monopoly, and such occasions as the present were enthusiastically
sought after by her friends and acquaintances. Later, when the artistes
had concluded their programme, there was to be a dance. The ballroom,
the further end of which boasted a fair-sized stage, had been
temporarily arranged with chairs to accommodate an audience, and in one
of the anterooms Virginie, with loving, skilful fingers, was putting the
finishing touches to Magda’s toilette.

Magda submitted passively to her ministrations. She was thinking of
Michael Quarrington, the man who had come into her life by such strange
chance and who had so deliberately gone out of it again. By the very
manner of his going he had succeeded in impressing himself on her mind
as no other man had ever done. Other men did not shun her like the
plague, she reflected bitterly!

But from the very beginning he had shown her that he disapproved of her
fundamentally. She was the “type of woman he hated!” Night and day that
curt little phrase had bitten into her thoughts, stinging her with its
quiet contempt.

She felt irritated that she should care anything about his opinion.
But if she were candid with herself she had to admit that she did care,
intensely. More than that, his departure from England had left her
conscious of an insistent and unaccountable little ache. The knowledge
that there could be no more chance meetings, that he had gone right out
of her ken, seemed like the sudden closing of a door which had just been
opening to her. It had somehow taken the zest out of things.

“Voila!” Virginie drew back to survey the results of her labours,
turning for approval to Gillian, who was in attendance in her capacity
of accompanist. “Is it not that mademoiselle looks ravishing?”

“Quite ravishing, Virginie,” agreed Gillian. “Did you expect her to look
anything else by the time you had finished decking her out?” she added
teasingly.

“It is nothing that I do,” responded the old Frenchwoman seriously.
“Mademoiselle cannot help but be beautiful to the eye--_le bon dieu_ has
created her like that.”

“I believe He has,” assented Gillian, smiling.

As she spoke the bell of the telephone instrument on the table beside
her rang imperatively and she lifted the receiver. Magda, watching her
face as she took the message, saw it suddenly blanch.

“Coppertop! . . . He’s ill!” she gasped.

“Ill?” Magda could hardly credit it. Two hours ago they had left the
child in perfect health.

“Yes.” Gillian swallowed, moistening her dry lips. “They’ve sent for the
doctor. It’s croup. Oh!”--despairingly, and letting the receiver fall
unheeded from her grasp--“What am I to do? What am I to do?”

Magda stepped forward, the filmy draperies of the dress in which she
was to dance floating cloudily about her as she moved. She picked up the
receiver as it hung dangling aimlessly from the stand and replaced it on
its clip.

“Do?” she said quietly. “Why, you’ll go straight home, of course. As
quickly as the car can take you. Virginie”--turning to the maid--“fly
and order the car round at once.”

Gillian looked at her distractedly.

“But you? Who’ll play for you? I can’t go! I can’t leave you!” Her voice
was shaken by sobs. “Oh, Coppertop!”

Magda slipped a comforting arm round her shoulder.

“Of course you’ll go--and at once, too. See, here’s your coat”--lifting
it up from the back of the chair where Gillian had thrown it. “Put it
on.”

Hardly conscious of what was happening, Gillian allowed herself to be
helped into the coat. Suddenly recollection returned.

“But your dance--your dance, Magda? You’ve forgotten!”

Magda shook her head.

“No. It will be all right,” she said soothingly. “Don’t worry,
Gillyflower. _You’ve_ forgotten that Davilof is playing here to-night.”

“Antoine?” Gillian stared at her incredulously. “But you can’t ask him
to play for you! You’d hate asking him a favour after--after his refusal
to accompany you any more.”

Magda smiled at her reassuringly.

“My dear,” she said, and there was an unaffected kindliness in her voice
which few people ever heard. “My dear, I’m not going to let a little bit
of cheap pride keep you away from Coppertop.”

She bent suddenly and kissed Gillian’s white, miserable face just as
Virginie reappeared in the doorway to announce that the car was waiting.

“There, run along. Look, would you like to take Virginie with you?”

“No, no.” Gillian shook her head decidedly. “I shall be quite all right.
Oh, Magda!”--impulsively drawing the slender figure close into her arms
a moment. “You are _good_!”

Magda laughed a trifle bitterly.

“That would be news to the world at large!” she replied. Then
cheerfully: “Now, don’t worry, Gillyflower. Remember they’ve got a
doctor there. And ‘phone me presently about Coppertop. If he’s worse,
I’ll come home as early as I can get away. Send the car straight back
here.”

As soon as Gillian had gone, Magda flung a loose wrap over her
diaphanous draperies and turned to Virginie.

“Where is Monsieur Davilof? Do you know?”

“_Mais oui, mademoiselle_! I saw him through the doorway as I came from
ordering the car. He is in the library.”

“Alone?”

“_Oui, mademoiselle_!” Virginie nodded eloquently. “He smokes a
cigarette--to steady the nerves, I suppose.”

Magda went swiftly out of the room. She reached the hall by way of
an unfrequented passage and slipped into the library closing the door
behind her.

“Antoine!”

At the sound of her voice Davilof, who had been standing by the fire,
wheeled round.

“You!” he exclaimed violently. “You!” And then remained silent, staring
at her.

“You knew I was dancing here to-night,” she said chidingly. “Why are you
so startled? We were bound to meet, weren’t we?”

“No, we were not. I proposed leaving the house the moment my solo was
over.”

Magda laughed a little.

“So afraid of me, Antoine?” she mocked gently.

He made no answer, but his hands, hanging at his sides, clenched
suddenly.

Magda advanced a few steps towards him and paused.

“Davilof,” she said quietly. “Will you play for me to-night?”

He looked at her, puzzled.

“Play for you?” he repeated. “But you have Mrs. Grey.”

“No. She can’t accompany me this evening.”

“And you ask me?” His voice held blank amazement.

“Yes. Will you do it?”

“Do you remember what I told you the last time we met? That I would
never play for you again?”

Magda drew her breath slowly. It was hurting her pride far more than
Gillian knew or could imagine to ask a favour of this man. And he wasn’t
going to make it easy for her, either--that was evident. But she must
ask it, nevertheless. For Gillian’s sake; for the sake of poor little
Coppertop fighting for breath and with no “mummie” at hand to help and
comfort him; and for the sake of Lady Arabella, too. After promising to
dance for her she couldn’t let her godmother down by crying off at the
last moment, when all the world and his wife had come crowding to her
house on the strength of that promise.

So she bent her head in response to Davilof’s contemptuous question.

“Yes, I remember,” she said quietly.

“And you still ask me to play for you?”

“I still ask you.”

Davilof laughed.

“You amaze me! And supposing I reply by saying I refuse?”

“But you won’t,” dared Magda.

Davilof’s eyes held something of cruelty in their hazel depths as he
answered quietly:

“On the contrary--I do refuse.”

Her hand went up to her throat. It was going to be more difficult than
she had anticipated!

“There is no one else who can play for me as you do,” she suggested.

“No,” fiercely. “Because no one loves you as I do.”

“What is the use of saying you love me when you won’t do the one
little thing I ask?” she retorted. “It is not often that I ask favours.
And--and no one has ever refused me a request before.”

Davilof could hear the note of proud resentment in her voice, and he
realised to the full that, in view of all that had passed between them
in the Mirror Room, it must have been a difficult matter for a woman of
Magda’s temperament to bring herself to ask his help.

But he had no intention of sparing her. None but himself knew how
bitterly she had hurt him, how cruelly she had stung his pride, when she
had flung him that contemptuous command: “I shall want you to-morrow,
Davilof!--same time.” He had unveiled his very soul before her--and in
return she had tossed him an order as though he were a lackey who had
taken a liberty. All his pain and brooding resentment came boiling up to
the surface.

“If I meant anything to you,” he said slowly, “if you had even looked
upon me as a friend, you could have asked what you liked of me. But you
showed me once--very clearly--that in your eyes I was nothing more than
your paid accompanist. Very well, then! Pay me--and I’ll play for you
to-night.”

“Pay you?”

“Oh, not in money”--with a short laugh.

“Then--then what do you mean?” Her face had whitened a little.

“It’s quite simple. Later on there is a dance. Give me a dance with
you!”

Magda hesitated. In other circumstances she would have refused
point-blank. Davilof had offended her--and more than that, the
revelation of the upsettingly vehement order of his passion for her
that day in the Mirror Room had frightened her not a little. There was
something stormy and elemental about it. To the caloric Pole, love was
love, and the fulfilment of his passion for the adored woman the supreme
necessity of life.

Realising that she had to withstand an ardour essentially unEnglish in
its violently inflammable quality, Magda was loth to add fuel to the
flame. And if she promised to dance with Davilof she must let him hold
her in his arms, risk that dangerous proximity which, she knew now,
would set the man’s wild pulses racing unsteadily and probably serve as
the preliminary to another tempestuous scene.

“Well?” Davilof broke in upon her self-communings. “Have I asked too
high a price?”

Time was flying. She must decide, and decide quickly. She took her
courage in both hands.

“No,” she returned quickly. “I will dance with you, Antoine.”

He bowed.

“Our bargain is complete, then,” he said ironically. “I shall be charmed
to play for you, mademoiselle.”



An hour or so later the last burst of applause had died away, and
the well-dressed crowd which had sat in enthralled silence while
the Wielitzska danced emerged chattering and laughing from the great
ballroom.

Their place was immediately taken by deft, felt-slippered men, who
proceeded swiftly to clear away the seats and the drugget which had been
laid to protect the surface of the dancing floor. In the twinkling of
an eye, as it were, they transformed what had been to all intents and
purposes a concert-hall into a flower-decked ballroom, while the members
of the band engaged for the dance began climbing agilely into their
allotted places on the raised platform preparatory to tuning up for the
evening’s work.

Magda, released at last from Virginie’s worshipfully careful hands,
came slowly down the main staircase. She was in black, diaphanous and
elusive, from which her flower-pale face and shoulders emerged like a
water-lily starring the dark pool on which it floats. A crimson rose
glowed just above her heart--that and her softly scarlet lips the only
touches of colour against the rare black-and-white loveliness of her.

She was descending the stairs reluctantly, mentally occupied in screwing
up courage to fulfil her promise to Davilof. A ‘phone message from
Friars’ Holm had come through saying that Coppertop was better. All
danger was passed and there was no longer any need for her to return
early. So it remained, now, for her to keep her pact with the musician.

As she rounded the last bend in the staircase, she saw that a man was
standing with bent head at the foot of the stairs, apparently waiting
for someone, and she threw a quick, nervous glance in the direction of
the motionless figure, thinking it might be Davilof himself. It would be
like his eager impatience to await her coming there. Then, as the lights
gleamed on fair, crisply waving hair she realised that the man was
Michael--Michael, whom she believed to be on his way to Spain!

Perhaps it was merely chance, or perhaps it was at the direct
inspiration of Lady Arabella, but, whatever may have been the cause,
Gillian had not confided to Magda that Quarrington was to be at her
godmother’s reception. The sudden, totally unexpected meeting with
him--with this man who had contrived to dominate her thoughts so
inexplicably--startled a little cry of surprise from her lips. She drew
back abruptly, and then--quite how it happened she could not tell--but
she missed her footing and fell.

For the fraction of a second she experienced a horrible sensation of
utter helplessness to save herself; then Michael’s arms closed round her
as he caught her before she reached the ground.

The shock of the fall stupefied her for a moment. She lay against his
breast like a terrified child, clinging to him convulsively.

“It’s all right,” he murmured soothingly. “You’re quite safe.”

Unconsciously his arms tightened round her. His breath quickened. The
satin-soft hair had brushed his cheek as she fell; the pale, exquisite
face and warm white throat lay close beneath his lips--all the fragrant
beauty of her gathered unresisting against his heart. He had only to
stoop his head----

With a stifled exclamation he jerked himself backward, squaring his
shoulders, and released her, though he still steadied her with a hand
beneath her arm.

“There, you are all right,” he said reassuringly. “No bones broken.”

The commonplace words helped to restore her poise.

“Oh! Thank you!” The words came a little gaspingly still. “I--I don’t
know how I came to fall like that. I think you startled me--I didn’t
expect to see you here.”

“I didn’t expect to be,” he returned, smiling a little.

Magda did not ask how it had come to pass. For the moment it was
enough for her that he _was_ there--that he had not gone away! She was
conscious of a sudden incomprehensible sense of tumult within her.

“It was lucky for me you happened to be standing just at the foot of the
stairs,” she said a little unsteadily.

“I didn’t ‘happen.’ I was there of _malice prepense_”--the familiar
crooked smile flashed out--“waiting for you.”

“Waiting for me?”

“Yes. Lady Arabella asked me to shepherd you into the supper-room and
see that you had a glass of champagne and a sandwich before the dancing
begins.”

“Orders from headquarters?”--smiling up at him.

“Exactly.”

He held out his arm and they moved away together. As they passed through
the crowded rooms one man murmured ironically to another:

“Quarrington’s got it badly, I should say.”

The second man glanced after the pair with amused eyes.

“So he’s the latest victim, is he? I head young Raynham’s nose was out
of joint.”

“You don’t mean she’s fired him?”

The other nodded.

“Got the push the day before yesterday,” he answered tersely.

“Poor devil! He’ll take it hard. He’s a hotheaded youngster. Just the
sort to go off and blow his brains out.”

Meanwhile Quarrington had established Magda at a corner table in the
empty supper-room and was seeing to it that Lady Arabella’s commands
were obeyed, in spite of Magda’s assurances that she was not in the
least hungry.

“Then you ought to be,” he replied. “After dancing. Besides, unlike the
rest of us, you had no dinner.”

“Oh, I had a light meal at six o’clock. But naturally, you can’t consume
a solid dinner just before giving a performance.”

“I’m not going to pay you compliments about your dancing,” he
observed quietly, after a pause. “You must receive a surfeit of them.
But”--looking at her with those direct grey eyes of his--“I’m glad I
didn’t leave England when I intended to.”

“Why didn’t you?” she asked impulsively.

He laughed.

“Because it’s so much easier to yield to temptation than to resist,” he
answered, not taking his eyes from her face.

She flushed a little.

“What was the temptation?” she asked uncertainly.

He waited an instant, then answered with deliberation:

“The temptation of seeing you again.”

“I should have thought you disapproved of me far too much for that to be
the case! Saint Michel, don’t you think you’re rather hard on me?”

“Am I? I had an old-fashioned mother, you see. Perhaps my ideas about
women are out of date.”

“Tell me them.”

He regarded her reflectively.

“Shall I? Well, I like to think of a woman as something sweet and
fragrant, infinitely tender and compassionate--not as a marauder and
despoiler. Wherever she comes, the place should be the happier for her
coming--not bereft by it. She should be the helper and healer in this
battered old world. That’s the sort of woman I should want my wife to
be; that’s the sort of woman my mother was.”

“And you think I’m--not like that? I’m the marauder, I suppose?”

He remained silent, and Magda sat with her bent head, fingering the stem
of her wine-glass restlessly.

“You like my dancing?” she said at last.

“You know I do.”

“Well”--she looked at him with a mixture of defiance and appeal. “My
dancing is me--the real me.”

He shook his head.

“You’re not the ‘Swan-Maiden,’ whose love was so great that she forgot
everything except the man she loved--and paid for it with her life.”

“The process doesn’t sound exactly encouraging,” she retorted with a
flash of dry humour. “But how do you know I’m not--like that?”

“How do I know? Because, if you knew anything at all about love, you
couldn’t play with it as you do. Even the love you’ve no use for is the
biggest thing the poor devil who loves you has to offer you; you’ve no
right to play battledore and shuttlecock with it.”

He spoke lightly, but Magda could hear the stern accusation that
underlay the words. She rose from the table abruptly.

“I think,” she said, “I think I’m afraid of love.”

As she spoke, she made a movement as though to quit the supper-room,
but, either by accident or design, Michael barred her way.

“Love,” he said, watching her face intently, “means
sacrifice--surrender.”

“And you believe I’m not capable of it?”

“I think,” he replied slowly, drawing aside to let her pass, “I think
I’m afraid to believe.”

Something in the deep tones of his voice sent a thrill of consciousness
through her. She felt her breath come and go unevenly and, afraid
to trust herself to speak, she moved forward without response in the
direction of the door. A moment later they were drawn into the stream of
people wending their way by twos and threes towards the ballroom.

As they entered, Antoine Davilof broke away from a little group of men
with whom he had been conversing and came to Magda’s side.

“The next dance is just beginning,” he said. “Are you engaged? Or may I
have it?”

“No, I’m not engaged,” she answered.

She spoke flurriedly. She was dreading this dance with Antoine. She
felt as though the evening had drained her of her strength and left her
unequal to a battle of wills should Antoine prove to be in one of his
hotheaded moods.

She glanced round her with a hint of desperation in her eyes. If only
Michael had asked her to dance with him instead! But he had bowed and
left her as soon as the musician joined them, so that there was no
escape to be hoped for that way.

Davilof was watching her curiously.

“I believe,” he said, “that you’re afraid to dance with me!”

On an impulse she answered him with perfect candour.

“I believe I am.”

“Then why did you promise? You did promise, you know.”

“I know. I promised. I promised because Coppertop had croup and they had
telephoned down for his mother to go to him. And you wouldn’t accompany
me unless I gave you this dance. So I promised it.”

Davilof’s eyes held a curiously concentrated expression.

“And you did this so that Mrs. Grey could go to her little boy--to nurse
him?”

Magda inclined her head.

“Yes,” she said simply.

“But you hated asking me--_loathed_ it!”

“Yes,” she said again.

He was silent for a moment. Then he drew back from her. “That was kind.
Extraordinarily kind,” he commented slowly. His expression was one of
frank amazement. “I did not believe you could be so kind--so womanly.”

“Womanly?” she queried, puzzled.

“Yes. For is not a woman--a good woman--always ready to sacrifice
herself for those she loves?”

Magda almost jumped. It was as though she were listening to an echo of
Quarrington’s own words.

“And you sacrificed yourself,” continued Davilof. “Sacrificed your
pride--crushed it down for the sake of Mrs. Grey and little Coppertop.
Mademoiselle”--he bowed gravely--“I kiss your hands. And see, I too, I
can be generous. I release you from your promise. I do not claim that
dance.”

If any single thing could have astonished Magda more than another, it
was that Davilof should voluntarily, in the circumstances, renounce the
dance she had promised him. It argued a fineness of perception and a
generosity for which she would never have given him credit. She felt a
little warm rush of gratitude towards him.

“No, no!” she cried impulsively, “you shan’t give up your dance.” Then,
as he still hesitated: “I should _like_ to dance with you--really I
should, Antoine. You’ve been so--so _decent_.”

Davilof’s face lit up. He looked radiant--like a child that has been
patted on the back and told it is good.

“No wonder we are all in love with you!” he exclaimed in low, vehement
tones; adding quickly, as he detected a flicker of apprehension in
Magda’s eyes: “But you need not fear to dance with me. I will be as your
brother--I will go on being ‘decent.’”

And he was. He danced as perfectly as any of his music-loving
nationality can dance, but there was a restraint, a punctilious
deference about him that, even while it amazed, availed to reassure
Magda and restore her shaken confidence in the man.

She did not realise or suspect that just those two simple actions of
hers--the good turn she had done Gillian at some considerable cost to
herself in the matter of personal pride, and her quick recognition of
the musician’s sense of fair play in renouncing his dance with her when
he knew the circumstances which had impelled her to promise it--these
two things had sufficed to turn Davilof’s heady, emotional devotion into
something more enduring and perhaps more dangerous, an abiding, deeply
rooted love and passion for her which was stronger than the man himself.

He left the house immediately after the conclusion of his dance with
her, and Magda was speedily surrounded by a crowd of would-be partners.
But she felt disinclined to dance again, and, always chary of her
favours in this respect, she remained watching the dancing in preference
to taking any part in it, exchanging small-talk with the men who,
finding she could not be induced to reconsider her decision, clustered
round her chair like bees round a honey-pot.

It was towards the end of the evening that Michael Quarrington finally
joined the group. Magda’s eyes rested on him with a mixture of annoyance
and approval--annoyance because she had expected him to ask her for a
dance quite early in the course of the programme and he had failed to do
so, and approval because he was of that clean-cut, fair-haired type
of man who invariably contrives to look particularly well-groomed and
thoroughbred in evening kit.

She had no intention of permitting him to request a dance at this late
hour, however, and rose from her seat as he approached.

“Ah! You, Mr. Quarrington?” she said gaily. “I am just going home. It’s
been a charming evening, hasn’t it?”

“Charming,” he rejoined courteously. “May I see you to your car?”

He offered his arm and Magda, dismissing her little court of disgruntled
admirers with a small gracious nod, laid her slim hand on his sleeve. As
they moved away together the orchestra broke into the swinging seductive
rhythm of a waltz.

Quarrington paused abruptly.

“Don’t go yet!” he said. “Dance this with me.”

His voice sounded strained and uneven. It was as though the words were
dragged from him without his own volition.

For an instant the two pairs of eyes met--the long, dark ones with their
slumbrous fire brooding beneath white lids, and the keen, hawk-like grey
ones. Then:

“Very well,” she answered a trifle breathlessly.

She was almost glad when the waltz came to an end. They had danced it
in utter silence--a tense, packed silence, vibrant with significances
half-hidden, half-understood, and she found herself quivering with a
strange uncertainty and nervousness as she and Quarrington together made
their way into the dim-lit quiet of the winter-garden opening off the
ballroom.

Overhead the green, shining leaves of stephanotis spread a canopy, pale
clusters of its white, heavy-scented bloom gleaming star-like in the
faint light of Chinese lanterns swung from the leaf-clad roof. From
somewhere near at hand came the silvery, showering plash of a fountain
playing--a delicate and aerial little sound against the robust harmonies
of the band, like the notes of a harp.

It seemed to Magda as though she and Michael had left the world behind
them and were quite alone, enfolded in the sweet-scented, tender silence
of some Garden of Eden.

They stood together without speaking. In every tingling nerve of her she
was acutely conscious of his proximity and of some rapidly rising tide
of emotion mounting within him. She knew the barrier against which it
beat and a little cry escaped her, forced from her by some impulse that
was stronger than herself.

“Oh, Saint Michel! Can’t you--can’t you believe in me?”

He swung round at the sound of her voice and the next moment she was
crushed against his breast, his mouth on hers, his kisses burning their
way to her very heart. . . .

Then voices, quick, light footsteps--someone else had discovered the
Eden of the winter-garden, and Michael released her abruptly.



Behind the chimneystacks the grey fingers of dawn were creeping up in
the sky as Magda drove home. In the wan light her face looked unusually
pale, and beneath the soft lace at her breast her heart throbbed
unevenly.

Five minutes ago Michael had held her in his arms and she had felt
herself stirred to a sudden passionate surrender and response that
frightened her.

Was this love--the love against which Diane had warned her? It had all
happened so suddenly--that last, unpremeditated dance, those tense,
vibrant moments in the winter-garden, then the jarring interruption
of other couples seeking its fragrant coolness. And she and Michael
suddenly apart.

Afterwards, only the barest conventionalities had passed between them.
Nothing else had seemed possible. Their solitude had been ruthlessly
destroyed; the outside world had thrust itself upon them without
warning, jerking them back to the self-consciousness of suddenly
arrested emotion.

“I must be going.” The stilted, banal little phrase had fallen awkwardly
from Magda’s lips, and Quarrington had assented without comment.

She felt confused and bewildered. What had he meant? Had he meant
anything at all? Was it possible that he believed in her now--trusted
her? It had been in answer to that low, imploring cry of hers--“_Saint
Michel, can’t you believe in me?_”--that he had taken her in his arms.

Looking out through the mist-blurred window at the pale streamers of
dawnlight penciling the sky, Magda’s eyes grew wistful--wonderingly
questioning the future. Was she, too, only waiting for the revelation of
dawn--the dawn of that mysterious thing called love which can transmute
this everyday old world of ours into heaven or hell?



Gillian was at the door to welcome her when at length the car pulled up
at Friars’ Holm. She looked rather white and there were purple shadows
under her eyes, but her lips smiled happily.

“Coppertop? How is he?” asked Magda quickly.

“Sleeping, thank God! He’s safe now! But--oh, Magda! It’s been awful!”

And quite suddenly Gillian, who had faced Death and fought him with a
dogged courage and determination that had won the grave-eyed doctor’s
rare approval, broke down and burst into tears.

Magda petted and soothed her, until at last her sobs ceased and she
smiled through her tears.

“I _am_ a fool!” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a moist, screwed-up
ball of something that had once been a cambric handkerchief. “But I’ve
quite recovered now--really. Come and tell me about everything. Did
Davilof play for you all right? And did you enjoy the dance afterwards?
And, oh, I forgot! There’s a letter for you on the mantelpiece. It was
delivered by hand while we were both at Lady Arabella’s.”

Mechanically, as she responded to Gillian’s rapid fire of questions,
Magda picked up the square envelope propped against the clock and slit
open the flap. It was probably only some note of urgent invitation--she
received dozens of them. An instant later a half-stifled cry broke from
her. Gillian turned swiftly.

“What is it?” she asked, a note of apprehension sharpening her voice.

Magda stared at her dumbly. Then she held out the letter.

“Read it,” she said flatly. “It’s from Kit Raynham’s mother.”

Gillian’s eyes flew along the two brief lines of writing:


“Kit has disappeared. Do you know where he is?--ALICIA RAYNHAM.”




CHAPTER VIII

THE FIRST REAPING

At breakfast, some hours later, Magda was in a curiously petulant and
uncertain mood. To some extent her fractiousness was due to natural
reaction after the emotional excitement of the previous evening.
Granted the discovery of the Garden of Eden, and add to this the almost
immediate intrusion of outsiders therein--for everybody else is an
“outsider” to the pair in possession--and any woman might be forgiven
for suffering from slightly frayed nerves the following day. And
in Magda’s case she had been already rather keyed up by finding the
preceding few days punctuated by unwelcome and unaccustomed happenings.

They all dated from the day of the accident which had befallen her in
the fog. It almost seemed as though that grey curtain of fog had been
a symbol of the shadow which was beginning to dog her footsteps--the
shadow which stern moralists designate “unpleasant consequences.”

First there had been Michael Quarrington’s plain and candid utterance of
his opinion of her. Then had followed Davilof’s headlong wooing and
his refusal, when thwarted, to play for her again. He, too, had not
precisely glossed things over in that tirade of accusation and reproach
which he had levelled at her!

And now, just when it seemed as though she had put these other ugly
happenings behind her, Kit Raynham, who for the last six months had been
one of the little court of admirers which surrounded her, had seen
fit to complicate matters by vanishing without explanation; while his
mother, in an absurd maternal flurry of anxiety as to what had become of
him, must needs write to her as though it inevitably followed that she
was responsible for his disappearance!

Magda was conscious of an irritated sense of injury, which Gillian’s
rather apprehensive little comments on the absence of further news
concerning young Raynham scarcely tended to allay.

“Oh, don’t be tiresome, Gillian!” she exclaimed. “The boy’s all right. I
expect he’s been having a joy-day--which has prolonged itself a bit.”

“It seems he hasn’t been seen or heard of since the day before
yesterday,” responded Gillian gravely. “They’re afraid he may--may have
committed suicide”--she brought out the word with a rush. “They’ve been
dragging the lake at his home.”

Magda flared.

“Where did you hear all this--this nonsense? You said nothing about it
last night.”

“Lady Raynham told me. She rang up half an hour ago--before you were
down--to ask if by any chance we had had any news of him,” replied
Gillian gently.

Magda pushed away her plate and, leaving her breakfast unfinished, moved
restlessly across to the window.

“There’s nothing about it in this morning’s paper, is there?” she asked.
Her tone sounded apprehensive.

Gillian’s eyes grew suddenly compassionate.

“Yes. There is--something,” she returned, laying her hand quickly over
the newspaper as though to withhold it.

But Magda swung round and snatched it from her. Gillian half rose from
her chair.

“Don’t look--don’t read it, Magda!” she entreated hastily.

The other made no response. Instead, she deliberately searched the
columns of the paper until she found a paragraph headed: Disappearance
of the Honourable Kit Raynham.

No exception could reasonably be taken to the paragraph in question. It
gave a brief resume of Kit Raynham’s short life up to date,

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