The Lamp of Fate by Margaret Pedler (page 4)

She was heading for a spot she knew of, a quarter of a mile below, where a wooden bridge spanned the river and the sun’s heat poured down unchecked by sheltering trees. Here she proposed to scramble out and bask in the golden warmth.

She had just established herself on a big, sun-warmed boulder when a familiar step sounded on the bridge and Dan Storran’s tall figure emerged into view. He pulled up sharply as he caught sight of her, his face taking on a schoolboy look of embarrassment. Deauville /plage/, where people bathed in companionable parties and strolled in and out of the water as seemed good to them, was something altogether outside Dan’s ken.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he began, flushing uncomfortably.

Magda waved to him airily.

“You needn’t be. I’m having a sun-bath. You can stay and talk to me if you like. Or are you too busy farming this morning?”

“No, I’m not too busy,” he said slowly.

There was a curious dazzled look in his eyes as they rested on her. Sheathed in the stockingette bathing-suit she wore, every line and curve of her supple body was revealed. Her wet, white limbs gleamed pearl-like in the quivering sunlight. The beauty of her ran through his veins like wine.

“Then come and amuse me!” Magda patted the warm surface of the rock beside her invitingly. “You can give me a cigarette to begin with.”

Storran sat down and pulled out his case. As he held a match for her to light up from, his hand brushed hers and he drew it away sharply. It was trembling absurdly.

He sat silent for a moment or two; then he said with an odd abruptness:

“I suppose you find it frightfully dull down here?”

Magda laughed a little.

“Is that because I told you to come and amuse me? . . . No, I don’t find it dull. Change is never really dull.”

“Well, you must find it change enough here from the sort of life you’ve been accustomed to lead.”

“How do you know what sort of life I lead?”–teasingly.

“I can guess. One has only to look at you. You’re different–different from everyone about here. The way you move–you’re like a thoroughbred amongst cart-horses.” He spoke with a kind of sullen bitterness.

Magda drew her feet up on to the rock and clasped her hands round her knees.

“Now you’re talking nonsense, you know,” she said amusedly. “Frankly, I like it down here immensely. I happened to be–rather worried when I came away from London, and there’s something very soothing and comforting about the country–particularly your lovely Devon country.”

“Worried?” Storran’s face darkened. “Who’d been worrying you?”

“Oh”–vaguely. “All sorts of things. Men–and women. But don’t let’s talk about worries to-day. This glorious sunshine makes me feel as though there weren’t any such things in the world.”

She leaned back, stretching her arms luxuriously above her head with the lithe, sensuous grace of movement which her training had made second nature. Storran’s eyes dwelt on her with a queer tensity of expression. Every gesture, every tone of her curiously attractive voice, held for him a disturbing allure which he could not analyse and against which he was fighting blindly.

He had never doubted his love for his wife. Quite honestly he had believed her the one woman in the world when he married her. Yet now he was beginning to find every hour a blank that did not bring him sight or sound of this other woman–this woman with her slender limbs and skin like a stephanotis petal, and her long Eastern eyes with the subtle lure which seemed to lie in their depths. Beside her June’s young peach-bloom prettiness faded into something colourless and insignificant.

“It must be nice to be you”–Magda nodded at him. “With no vague, indefinable sort of things to worry you.”

He smiled reluctantly.

“How do you know I haven’t?”

“Oh, because I do.”

“A woman’s reason!”

“Quite. But women’s reasons are generally very sound–we were endowed with a sixth sense, you know! Besides–it’s obvious, isn’t it? Here you are–you and June–living a simple, primitive kind of existence, all to yourselves, like Adam and Eve. And if you do have a worry it’s a real definite one–as when a cow inconveniently goes and dies or your root crop fails. Nothing intangible and uncertain about that!”

“Have you forgotten that the serpent intruded even upon Adam and Eve?” he asked quietly.

She laughed.

“Is that a hit at Gillian and me? I know–June told us–that you were horribly opposed to anyone’s coming here for the summer. I thought that you had got over that by now?”

“So I have”–bluntly.

“Then we’re not–not unwelcome visitors any longer?” the soft, tantalising voice went on. The low cadence of it seemed to tug at his very heartstrings.

He leaned nearer to her and, catching both her hands in his, twisted her round so that she faced him.

“Why do you ask?” he demanded, his voice suddenly roughened and uneven.

“Because I wanted to know–of course!”–lightly.

“Then–you’re not an unwelcome visitor. You never have been! From the moment you came the place was different somehow. When you go—-“

He stopped as though startled by the sound of his own words–struck by the full significance of them.

“When you go!” he repeated blankly. His grip of her slight hands tightened till it was almost painful. “But you won’t go! I can’t let you go now! Magda–“

The situation was threatening to get out of hand. Magda drew quickly away from him, springing to her feet.

“Don’t talk like that,” she said hastily. “You don’t mean it, you know.”

With a sudden, unexpected movement she slipped from his side and ran down to the river’s edge. He caught a flashing glimpse of scarlet, heard the splash as her slim body cleaved the water, and a moment later all he could see was the red of her turban cap, bobbing like a scarlet poppy on the surface of the river, and the glimmer of a moon- white arm and shoulder as a smooth overhand stroke bore her swiftly away from him.

He stood staring after her, conscious of a sudden bewildered sense of check and thwarting. The blood seemed leaping in his veins. His heart thudded against his ribs. He stepped forward impetuously as though to plunge in after the receding gleam of scarlet still flickering betwixt the branches which overhung the river.

Then, with a stifled exclamation, he drew back, brushing his hand across his eyes as though to clear their vision. What mad impulse was this urging him on to say and do such things as he had never before conceived himself saying or doing?

Magda had checked him on the brink of telling her–what? The sweat broke out on his forehead as the realisation surged over him.

“God!” he muttered. “God!”

CHAPTER XII

THE LATEST NEWS

Magda hardly knew what impulse had bidden her save Dan Storran from himself–check the hot utterance to which he had so nearly given voice and which to a certain extent she had herself provoked. Driven by the bitterness of spirit which Michael’s treatment of her had engendered, she knew that she had flirted outrageously with Dan ever since she had come to Stockleigh. She had bestowed no thought on June–pretty, helpless June, watching with distressed, bewildered eyes while Dan unaccountably changed towards her, his moods alternating from sullen unresponsiveness to a kind of forced and contrite tenderness which she had found almost more difficult to meet and understand.

It was indeed something altogether apart from any sympathy for June which had prompted Magda to leave Storran before he uttered words that he might regret, but which no power on earth could ever recall. Still beneath the resentment and wounded pride which Michael’s going had caused her flickered the spark of an ideal utterly at variance with the whole tenor of the teaching of poor Diane’s last embittered days– the ideal of womanhood which had been Michael’s. And the impulse which had bade her leave Storran so abruptly was born of the one-time resolution she had made to become the sort of woman Michael would wish his wife to be.

She felt oddly perturbed when at last she reached the seclusion of her chintzy bedroom underneath the sloping roof. A vague sense of shame assailed her. The game, as between herself and Dan, was hardly a fair one, after all, and she could well picture the cold contempt in Michael’s eyes had he been looking on at it.

Though he had no right to disapprove of her now! He had forfeited that right–if he had ever had it–when he went away without a word of farewell–without giving her even the chance to appeal against the judgment which, by his very going, he had silently pronounced against her.

For months, now, she had been a prey to a conflicting jumble of emotions–the pain and hurt pride which Michael’s departure had occasioned her, the craving for anything that might serve to distract her thoughts and keep them from straying back to those few vibrant meetings with him, and deep down within her an aching, restless wonder as to whether she would ever see him again.

With an effort she dismissed the fresh tangle of thought provoked by the morning’s brief scene with Dan Storran, and, dressing quickly, went downstairs to the mid-day dinner which was the order of things at Stockleigh.

At first the solid repast, with its plentitude of good farmhouse fare partaken of during the hottest hour of the day, had somewhat appalled Magda. But now she had grown quite accustomed to the appearance of a roast joint or of a smoking, home-cured ham, attended by a variety of country vegetables and followed by fruit tart and clotted cream.

Although she herself, as befitted a woman whose “figure was her fortune” according to Lady Arabella, partook extremely sparingly of this hospitable meal, it somehow pleased her to see big Dan Storran come in from his work in the fields and do full justice to the substantial fare. To Magda, ultra-modern and over-civilised as she was, there was something refreshing in the simple and primitive usages of Stockleigh Farm and its master–this man who toiled, and satisfied his hunger, and rested from toil, just as his fathers had done before him, literally fulfilling the law: In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.

And perhaps if Magda had never crossed his path Dan Storran might have gone his way contentedly, toiling from sun-up to sun-down till all his days were finished.

Even although she had crossed it, she might still have left him pretty much as she found him–unawakened to the deeps of his own nature–if she had remained in her present ambiguous mood, half-remorseful, half indifferent. But it was precisely at this particular juncture that it pleased Fate to give a fresh twist to her swiftly turning wheel.

Storran did not come in until dinner was half over, and when finally he appeared he was somewhat taciturn and avoided meeting Magda’s eyes. June got up from the table and went dutifully into the kitchen to fetch the joint of meat and vegetables which she had been keeping hot for him there. Abruptly Dan followed her.

“Sorry I’m late, June,” he said awkwardly. “Here, give the tray to me; I’ll carry it in.”

June paused in the middle of the kitchen, flushing right up to the soft tendrils of hair that curled about her forehead. It was weeks since Dan had offered to relieve her of any of her housewifely tasks, although at one time he had been wont to hurry home, if he could manage to do so, on purpose to help her. Dozens of times they had laid the table together, punctuating the process with jokes and gay little bursts of laughter and an odd kiss or two thrown in to sweeten the work. But not lately–not since the visitors from London had come to Stockleigh Farm.

So June blushed and looked at her husband with eyes that were suddenly sweet and questioning. She knew, though she had not told him yet, that there was a reason now why he should try to save her when his greater strength could do so, and for a moment she wondered shyly if he had guessed.

“Why, Dan, Dan—-” she stammered.

His face darkened. Her obvious surprise irritated him, pricking his conscience.

“It’s not very complimentary of you to look so taken aback when I offer to carry something for you,” he said. “Anyone might think I never did wait on my wife.”

The blood drained away from June’s face as suddenly as it had rushed there.

“Well, you don’t often, do you?” she returned shortly.

They re-entered the sitting-room together and Magda glanced up, smiling approval. She, too, was feeling somewhat conscience-stricken, and to see Dan helping his wife in this everyday, intimate sort of fashion seemed to minimise the significance of that little incident which had occurred by the river’s edge.

“What a nice, polite husband!” she commented gaily. “Mr. Storran, you really out to come up to London and give classes–‘Manners for Men,’ you know. Very few of them wait on their wives these days.”

June upset the salt and busied herself spooning it up again from the cloth. There was no answering smile on her face. She was not quite clear /why/ Dan had followed her out into the kitchen so unexpectedly, but she sensed that it was not the old, quick impulse to wait upon her which had actuated him.

Had she but known it, it was the same instinct, more primitively manifested, which induces a man whose conscience is not altogether clear respecting his loyalty towards his wife to bring her home an unexpected gift of jewellery.

The disturbing memory of a lithe, scarlet-sheathed figure had been with Dan all morning as he went about his work, and he was sullenly ashamed of the riot which the vision occasioned within him and of his own utter helplessness to master it. It–it was damnable! So he accompanied his wife to the kitchen and offered to carry in the joint.

Following upon this incident the atmosphere seemed to become all at once constrained and difficult. June sat very silent, her eyes holding that expression of pain and bewilderment which was growing habitual to them, while Storran hurried through his meal in the shortest possible time. As soon as he had finished he pushed back his chair abruptly and, with a muttered apology, quitted the room and went out again on to the farm. June rose and began clearing the table mechanically.

“Can’t I help you?” Gillian paused as she was about to follow Magda out of the room. “You look so tired to-day.”

June’s lip quivered sensitively. She was in the state of nerves when a little unexpected sympathy is the most upsetting thing imaginable.

“Oh, I can’t let you!” she answered hastily. “No–really!”–as Gillian calmly took the tray she was carrying out of her hands.

“Supposing you go and lie down for a little while,” suggested Gillian practically. “And leave the washing-up to Coppertop and me!”

The tears suddenly brimmed up into the wide-open blue eyes.

“Oh, I couldn’t!”

“Wouldn’t you like a little rest?” urged Gillian persuasively. “I believe you’d be asleep in two minutes!”

“I believe I should,” acknowledged June faintly. “I–I haven’t been sleeping very well lately.”

A little shudder ran through her as she recalled those long hours each night when she lay at Dan’s side, staring wide-eyed into the darkness and wondering dully what it was that had come between herself and her husband–come just at the time when, with his unborn child beneath her heart, they two should have been drawn together in to the most wonderful and blessed comradeship and understanding. Only Dan didn’t know this–didn’t know that before the snowdrops lifted their white heads again from the green carpet of spring there would be a little son–June was sure it would be a son, to grow up tall and strong like Dan himself!–born of the love which had once been so sweet and untroubled by any creeping doubts.

“I assure you”–Gillian broke in on the miserable thoughts that were chasing each other through June’s tired brain–“I assure you, Coppertop and I are very competent people. We won’t break a single dish!”

“But you’ve never been used to that kind of thing–washing-up!” protested June, glancing significantly at Gillian’s white hands and soft, pretty frock of hyacinth muslin.

“Haven’t I?” Gillian laughed gaily. “I haven’t always been as well off as I am not, and I expect I know quite as much about doing ‘chores’ as you! Come now!” She waited expectantly.

“Dan would be awfully angry if he knew–it’s my duty, you see,” objected June, visibly weakening.

“If he knew! But what a husband doesn’t know his heart doesn’t grieve over,” replied Gillian sagely. “There, that’s settled. Come along upstairs and let me tuck you up in your bed, and leave the rest to Coppertop and me.”

And June, with her heart suddenly warmed and comforted in the way in which an unexpected kindness does warm and comfort, went very willingly and, tired out in body and mind, fell asleep in ten minutes.

Meanwhile Magda had established herself in the hammock slung from the boughs of one of the great elms which shaded the garden. She had brought a book with her, since her thoughts were none too pleasant company just at the moment, and was speedily absorbed in its contents.

It was very soothing and tranquil out there in the noonday heat. The gnats hovered in the sunlight, dancing and whirling in little transient clusters; now and again a ladybird flickered by or a swallow swooped so near that his darting shadow fell across her book; while all about her sounded the pleasant hum of a summer’s day–the soft susurration of the pleasant hum of a thousand insect voices blending into an indefinite, murmurous vibration of the air.

Occasionally the whir of a motor-car sweeping along the adjacent road broke harshly across the peaceful quiet. Magda glanced up with some annoyance as the first one sped by, dragging her back to an unwilling sense of civilisation. Then she bent her head resolutely above her book and declined to be distracted any further, finally losing herself completely in the story she was reading.

So it came about that when a long, low, dust-powdered car curved in between the granite gateposts of Stockleigh Farm and came abruptly to a standstill, she remained entirely oblivious of its advent. Nor did she see the tall, slender-limbed man who had been driving, and whose questing hazel eyes had descried her almost immediately, slip from his seat behind the steering-wheel and come across the grass towards her.

“/Antoine!/”

The book fell from her hand and she sat up suddenly in the hammock.

“What on earth are you doing here?” she demanded. There was no welcome in her tone.

For a moment Davilof remained watching her, the sunshine, slanting between the leaves of the trees, throwing queer little flickering lights into the hazel eyes and glinting on his golden-brown hair and beard.

“What are you doing here?” she repeated.

“I came–to see you,” he said simply.

There was something disarming in the very simplicity of his reply. It seemed to imply an almost child-like wonder that she should ask–that there could possibly be any other reason for his presence.

But it failed to propitiate Magda in the slightest degree. She felt intensely annoyed that anyone from the outside world–from her world of London–should have intruded upon her seclusion at Ashencombe, nor could she imagine how Davilof had discovered her retreat.

“How did you learn I was here?” she asked.

“From Melrose.”

Magda’s eyes darkened sombrely.

“Do you mean you bribed him?” she asked quickly. “Oh, but surely not!” –in dismayed tones. “Melrose would go to the stake sooner than accept a bribe!”

Davilof’s mouth twisted in a rueful smile.

“I’m sure he would! I tried him, but he wouldn’t look at a bribe of any sort. So I had to resort to strategy. It was one evening, when he was taking your letters to post, and I waited for him at the pillar- box. I came up very quietly behind him and just nipped one of the letters, readdressed to you, out of his hand. I read the address and then posted the letter for him. It was very simple.”

He recounted the incident with a little swaggering air of bravado, boyishly delighted at the success of his small ruse. Vexed as she was Magda could hardly refrain from smiling; the whole thing was so eminently un-English–so exactly like Davilof!

“Well, now that you have seen me, will you please go away again?” she said coolly, reopening her book as though to end the conversation.

He regarded her with unqualified reproach.

“Won’t you even ask me to tea?” he said plaintively.

“Certainly not,” Magda was beginning. But precisely as she spoke June Storran, looking more herself again after her short sleep, came towards them from the house.

Her face brightened as she caught sight of Davilof. Even to June’s inexperienced eyes it was quite obvious that he admired the woman with whom he was talking. The very way he looked at her told her that. Presumably he was one of her London friends who had motored to Devonshire to see her. No man–within the limited scope of June’s knowledge of men–did that deliciously absurd, extravagant kind of thing unless he was tremendously in love. Nor would any nice woman let a man take such a journey on her behalf unless she reciprocated his feelings. Of this June–whose notions were old-fashioned–felt assured. So her spirits rose accordingly. Since, if these two were on the verge of becoming engaged, the mere fact would clear away the indefinable shadows which seemed to have been menacing her own happiness from the time Miss Vallincourt had come to Stockleigh.

“Tea is just ready,” she announced, approaching. “Will you come in? And perhaps your friend will have tea with us?” she added shyly.

Davilof was presented and June repeated her invitation. He shot a glance of triumph at Magda.

“I shall be delighted, madame,” he said, giving June one of his quaint little foreign bows. “But–the sun is shining so gloriously–might we not have it out here?”

June looked round her doubtfully. As is often the case with people born and bred in the country, it never occurred to the Storrans to have the family meals out-of-doors, and June felt considerable misgiving as to whether Dan would appreciate the innovation.

“Ah, please, madame!” pleaded Davilof persuasively. “Let us have it here–under this tree. Why, the tree grows here expressly for the purpose!”

Davilof had all the charm of his nationality, and June capitulated, retreating to make the necessary arrangements.

“I don’t fancy Dan Storran will at all approve of the alteration from his usual customs which you’ve engineered,” observed Magda when they were again alone.

“Dan Storran?” Davilof’s glance flashed over her face, searching, questioning.

“The owner of the place. He’s been teaching me to ride,” she added inconsequently.

“Who is he?”–with swift jealousy. “The little fair-haired lady’s brother?”

“No, her husband. I said /Mrs./ Storran.”

Davilof’s interest waned suddenly.

“Did you?”–indifferently. “I didn’t notice. She’s a pretty little person.”

Magda agreed absently. A fresh difficulty had occurred to her; Davilof might chance to give away to the Storrans the secret of her identity.

“Oh, by the way,” she said hurriedly. “They don’t know me here as Magda Wielitzska. I’m plain Miss Vallincourt to them–enjoying the privileges of being a nobody! You’ll be sure to remember, won’t you?” He nodded, and she pursued more lightly: “And now, as you insist on having your tea here, you might begin to earn it by telling me the latest London gossip. We hear nothing at all down here. We don’t even get a London newspaper.

“I don’t think there is much news. There never is at this time of the year. Everybody’s out of town.”

He vouchsafed one or two items concerning mutual friends–an engagement here, a forthcoming divorce there. So-and-so was in Italy and Mrs. Somebody Else was said to have eloped with a well-known actor-manager to America–all the odds and ends of gossip that runs like wildfire over the social prairie.

“Oh, by the way,” he went on, “your artist friend–“

“Which artist friend?” Magda interrupted almost rudely. She was moved by a perfectly irrational impulse to stop him, to delay what he had to say.

“Why, Quarrington–Michael Quarrington. It seems he has married a Spanish woman–a rather lovely person who had been sitting to him for one of his pictures. That’s the latest bit of news.”

For an instant it seemed to Magda as though the whole world stood still–gripped in a strange, soundless stillness like the catastrophic pause which for an infinitesimal space of time succeeds a bad accident. Then she heard herself saying:

“Really? Where did you hear that?”

“Oh, there’ve been several rumours of a beautiful Spaniard whom he has been using as a model. The Arlingtons were travelling in Spain and saw her. Mrs. A. said she was a glorious creature–a dancer. And the other day I saw in one of the papers–the /Weekly Gossip/ I think it was– that he’d married her.”

The carelessly spoken words drove at Magda with the force of utter certainty. It was true, then–quite true! The fact that the Spaniard had been a dancer gave an irrefutable reality to the tale; Michael so worshipped every form of dancing.

“Never give your heart to any man.” Her mother’s last cynical warning beat in Magda’s brain with a dull iteration that almost maddened her. She put her hand up to her throat, feeling as if she were choking.

Then, dimly, as though from a great way off, she heard Antoine’s voice again:

“I’m glad Quarrington’s married. He was the man who saved you in the fog–you remember?–and I’ve always been afraid you might get to care for him.”

Magda was conscious of one thing and one thing only–that somewhere, deep down inside her, everything had turned to ice. She knew she would never feel anything again–much. . . . She thought death must come like that sometimes–just one thrust of incredible, immeasurable agony, and then a dull, numbed sense of finality.

“. . . afraid you might get to care for him.” The meaning of Antoine’s last words slowly penetrated her mind. She gave a hard little laugh.

“Why should I? Does one ‘get to care’ for a man just because he does the only obvious thing there is to do in an emergency?”

She was surprised to hear how perfectly natural her voice sounded. It was quite steady. Reassured, she went on, shrugging her shoulders:

“Besides–do I ever care?”

Antoine, sitting on the grass at her feet, suddenly raised himself a little and put his hand over hers as they lay very still and folded on her lap.

“You shall care–some time,” he said in a low, tense voice. “I swear it!”

CHAPTER XIII

DAN STORRAN’S AWAKENING

“Fairy Lady, we’re going to have a picnic tea!”

Coppertop’s excited voice, shrilling across the garden as he came racing over the grass, put an abrupt end to a scene that was threatening to develop along the familiar tempestuous lines dictated by Antoine’s temperament.

The child’s advent was somewhat differently received–by Magda with unmixed relief, by Antoine with a baulked gesture of annoyance. However, he recovered himself almost immediately, and when, a moment later, June reappeared, laden with the paraphernalia for tea, he rushed forward with his usual charming manners to assist her.

Presently Gillian joined them, exclaiming with surprise as she perceived who was the visitor.

“Why, this is like a bit of London appearing in our very midst,” she declared, shaking hands with Davilof. “Where have you hailed from? I heard the car but never suspected you were the arrival.”

“I’m on holiday,” he replied. “And it struck me”–his hazel eyes smiled straight into hers–“that Devonshire might be a very delightful place in which to spend my holiday.”

Magda looked up suddenly from stirring her tea.

“I think you’ve made a mistake, Davilof,” she said curtly. “You’re not likely to enjoy a holiday in Devonshire.”

June, innocently unaware of any double entente in Magda’s speech, glanced across at her in astonishment.

“Oh, but why not, Miss Vallincourt? Devon is a lovely county; most people like it so much. But perhaps you don’t care for the country, Mr.–Mr. Davilof?” She stumbled a little over the foreign name.

“I think it would depend upon who my neighbours were–whether I liked it or nor,” he returned, meeting Magda’s glance challengingly over the top of June’s head, bent above the teacups. “I feel sure I should like it here. And there is a charming little inn at Ashencombe where one might stop.”

Gillian divined that a veiled passage of arms between Magda and the musician underlay the light discussion. Moreover–though she had no clue to the cause–she was sensitively conscious that the former was not quite herself. She had seen that white, set look on her face before. Something had distressed her, and Gillian felt apprehensive lest Davilof had been the bearer of unwelcome tidings. It was either that, or else he must have succeeded in frictioning Magda in some way himself, since, beyond flinging an occasional double-edged sentence in his direction, she seemed absent and disinclined to take part in the conversation.

It was almost a relief to Gillian when Dan Storran appeared, although the recollection of the strained atmosphere which had attended the previous meal did not hold out much promise of better things to come. His face was still clouded and he glowered at the tea-table under the elms with dissatisfied eyes.

“What on earth’s the meaning of this?” he demanded ungraciously of his wife. “Is it some newfangled notion that’s got you?”

June coloured up nervously, and was about to falter an explanation of the innovation when Magda suddenly took the matter out of her hands.

“There’s nothing newfangled about tea out-of-doors, on a glorious day like this,” she said. “It’s the only sensible thing to do. You don’t really mind, do you?”

She smiled up at him provocatively and his sombre face lightened.

“Not if you like it,” he replied shortly.

“Well, I do. So sit down and be pleased–instead of looking like a thundercloud, please.” The softness in her voice robbed the speech of its sharpness. “I have a friend here–and we’re having tea outside in his honour.”

She introduced the two men, who exchanged a few commonplace words– each, meanwhile, taking the measure of the other through eyes that were frankly hostile. They were of such dissimilar type that there was practically no common ground upon which they could meet, and with the swift, unerring intuition of the lover each had recognised the other as standing in some relationship to Magda which premised a just cause for jealousy. Both men endeavoured to secure her undivided attention and, failing lamentably, their mutual antagonism deepened, smouldering visibly beneath the stiff platitudes they exchanged with one another.

Gillian, thrust rather into the position of an onlooker, watched the proceedings with amused eyes–her amusement only tempered by the slightly apprehensive feeling concerning Magda of which she had been vaguely conscious from the first moment she had found her in Davilof’s company, and which continued to obsess her.

True, she no longer wore that set, still look which Gillian had observed on her face prior to Dan Storran’s appearance upon the scene. But even when she smiled and talked, playing the men off one against the other with a deft skill that was inimitable, there seemed a curious new hardness underlying it all–a certain reckless deviltry for which Gillian was at a loss to account.

June watched, too, with troubled eyes. Half an hour ago she had been feeling ridiculously happy, comfortably assured in her own mind that this tall, rather exquisite foreigner and the woman whose presence in her home had occasioned so much bitter heart-burning were only hesitating, as it were, on the brink of matrimony. And now–now she did not know what to think! Miss Vallincourt was treating Davilof with an airy negligence that to June’s honest and candid soul seemed altogether incompatible with such circumstances.

Meanwhile, with her own ears attuned to catch each varying shade of Dan’s beloved voice, she could not but perceive its change of quality, slight, but unmistakable, when he spoke to Magda–the sudden deepening of it–and the unconscious self-betrayal of his glance as it rested on her. It was a relief when at last he got up and moved off, excusing himself on the plea that he had some work he must attend to. As he shook hands with Davilof the eyes of the two men met, hard as steel and as hostile.

Storran’s departure was the signal for the breaking-up of the party. June returned to the house, while Gillian allowed herself to be carried off by Coppertop to visit the calves, which were a never- failing source of interest to him.

Left alone, an awkward pause ensued between Davilof and Magda, backwash of the obvious clash of antagonism between the two men.

“So!” commented Davilof, at last. “It looks as though there might be another Raynham episode down here before long.”

The colour rushed up into Magda’s face.

“Don’t you think that remark is in rather bad taste?” she replied icily.

He shrugged his shoulders.

“Perhaps it was. But the men who love you get rather beyond considering the matter of good or bad taste.”

She made a petulant gesture.

“Oh, don’t begin that old subject again. We’ve had it all out before. It’s finished.”

“It’s not finished.”

There was a clipped, curt force about the brief denial. The good- humoured, big-child mood in which Davilof had joyously narrated to her how he had circumvented the unfortunate Melrose had passed, leaving the man–turbulent and passionately demanding as of old.

“It’s not finished,” he repeated. “It never will be–till you’re my wife.”

Magda laughed lightly.

“Then I’m afraid it will have to remain unfinished–a continued-in- our-next kind of thing. For I certainly haven’t the least intention of becoming your wife. Do understand that I /mean/ it. And please go away. You had no business to come down here at all.”

A smouldering fire lit itself in his eyes.

“No!” he said, taking a step nearer her. “No! I’m not going. I came because I can’t bear it any longer without you. Since you went away I’ve been half-mad, I think. I can’t eat or sleep! I can’t even play!” –he flung out his sensitive musician’s hands in a gesture of despair.

Magda glanced at him quickly. It was true. The man looked as though he had been suffering. She had not noticed it before. His face had altered–worn a trifle fine; the line from chin to cheek-bone had hollowed somewhat and his eyes held a certain feverish brightness. But although she could see the alteration, it did not move her in the least. She felt perfectly indifferent. It was as though the band of ice which seemed to have clasped itself about her heart when she heard of Michael’s marriage had frozen her capacity for feeling anything at all.

“I thought once”–Davilof was speaking again–“I thought once that you had said ‘no’ to me because of Quarrington. But now I know you never cared for him—-“

“How do you know?”

The question sprang from her lips before she was aware.

“How do I know?” Davilof laughed harshly. “Why, because the man who was loved by Magda Wielitzska wouldn’t marry any other woman. There would be no other woman in the world for him. . . . There’s no other woman in the world for me.” His control was rapidly deserting him. “Magda, I can’t live without you! I’ve told you–I can neither eat nor sleep. I burn for you! If you refuse to give yourself to me, you destroy me!”

Swept by an emotion stronger than himself, his acquired Englishisms went by the board. He was all Pole in the picturesque ardour of his speech.

Magda regarded him calmly.

“My dear Davilof,” she said quietly. “What weight do you suppose such an argument would have with me?”

The cool, ironic little question, with its insolent indifference, checked him like the flick of a lash across the face. He turned away.

“None, I suppose,” he admitted bitterly. “You are fire and flame–but within, you are ice.”

“Yes,” she said, almost as though to herself. “Within, I’m ice. I believe that’s true.”

“True!” he repeated. “Of course it’s true. If it were not—-“

A slight smile tilted her mouth.

“Well?” she echoed. “If it were not?”

He swung round. With a quick stride he was beside her. His eyes blazing with a sudden fury of passion and resentment, he caught her by the shoulders, forcing her to face him.

“God!” he muttered thickly. “What are you made of? You make men go through hell for you! Even here–here in this little country place– you do it! Storran’s wife–one can see her heart breaks, and it is you who are breaking it. Yet nothing touches you! You’ve no conscience like other women–no heart–“

Magda pulled herself out of his grasp.

“Oh, do forget that I’m a woman, Davilof! I’m a dancer. Nothing else matters. I don’t want to be troubled with a heart. And–and I think they left out my soul.”

“Yes,” he agreed with intense bitterness. “I think they did. One day, Magda some man will kill you. You’ll try him too far.”

“Indeed? Is that what you contemplate doing when you finally lose patience with me?”

He shook his head.

“I shall not lose patience–until you are another man’s wife,” he said quietly. “And I don’t intend you to be that.”

An hour later, Gillian, having dispatched her small son to bed and seen him safely tucked up between the lavender-scented sheets, discovered Magda alone in the low-raftered sitting-room. She was lying back idly in a chair, her hands resting on the arms, in her eyes a curious abstracted look as though she were communing with herself.

Apparently she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice Gillian’s entrance, for she did not speak.

“What are you thinking about? Planning a new dance that shall out-vie /The Swan-Maiden/?” asked Gillian at last, for the sake of something to say. The silence and Magda’s strange aloofness frightened her in some way.

It was quite a moment before Magda made any answer. When she did, it was to say with a bitter kind of wonder in her voice:

“What centuries ago it seems since the first night of /The Swan- Maiden/!”

“It’s not very long,” began Gillian, then checked herself and asked quickly: “Is there anything the matter, Magda? Did Antoine bring you bad news of some kind?”

“He brought me the offering of his hand and heart. That’s no news, is it?”

The opening was too good to be lost. With the remembrance of June’s wistful face before her eyes, Gillian plunged in recklessly.

“Apropos of such offerings–don’t you think it would be wiser if you weren’t quite so nice to Dan Storran?”

“Am I nice to him?”

“Too much so for my peace of mind–or his! It worries me, Magda– really. You’ll play with fire once too often.”

“My dear Gillian, I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. Do you imagine”–with a small, fine smile–“that I’m in danger of losing my heart to a son of the soil?”

Gillian could have shaken her.

“/You?/ You don’t suppose I’m afraid for you! It’s Dan Storran who isn’t able to look after himself.” She stooped over Magda’s chair and slipped an arm persuasively round her shoulders. “Come away, Magda. Let’s leave Stockleigh–go home to London.”

“Certainly not.” Magda stood up suddenly. “I’m quite well amused down here. I don’t propose to leave till our time is up.”

She spoke with unmistakable decision, and Gillian, feeling that it would be useless to urge her further at the moment, went slowly out of the room and upstairs. As she went she could hear Dan’s footstep in the passage below. It sounded tired–quite unlike his usual swinging stride with its suggestion of impetuous force.

But it was not work that had tired Dan Storran that afternoon. When he had quitted the little party gathered beneath the elms, he had started off across the fields, unheeding where he went, and for hours he had been tramping, deaf and blind to the world around him, immersed in the thoughts that had driven him forth.

The full significance of the last few weeks had suddenly come home to him. Till now he had been drifting–drifting unthinkingly, conscious only that life had become extraordinarily full of interest and of a breathless kind of happiness, half sweet, half bitter. Bitter when Magda was not with him, sweet with a maddening sweetness when she was.

He had not stopped to consider what it all meant–why the dull, monotonous round of existence on the farm to which he had long grown accustomed should all at once have come alive–grown vibrant and quick with some new impulse.

But the happenings of to-day had suddenly shown him where he stood. That revealing moment by the river’s edge with Magda, the swift, unreasoning jealousy of Davilof which had run like fire through his veins–jealousy because the other man was so evidently an old acquaintance with prior rights in her which seemed to set him, Dan Storran, quite outside the circle of their intimacy–had startled him into recognition of how far he had drifted.

He loved her–craved for her with every fibre of his being. She was his woman, and beside the tumultuous demand for her of all his lusty manhood the quiet, unexacting affection which he bore his wife was as water is to wine.

And since in Dan’s simple code of ethics a man’s loyalty to his wife occupied a very definite and unassailable position, the realisation came to him fraught with the acme of bitterness and self-contempt. Nor did he propose to yield to the madness in his blood. Hour after hour, as he tramped blindly across country, he thrashed the matter out. This love which had come to him was a forbidden thing–a thing which must be fought and thrust outside his life. For the sake of June he must see no more of Magda. She must go–leave Stockleigh. Afterwards he would tear the very memory of her out of his heart.

Dan was a very direct person. Having taken his decision he did not stop to count the cost. That could come afterwards. Dimly he apprehended that it might be a very heavy one. But he was strong, now –strong to do the only possible thing. As he stood with his hand on the latch of the living-room door, he wondered whether what he had to say would mean to Magda all, or even a part, of what it meant to him– wondered with a sudden uncontrollable leaping of his pulses. . . . The latch grated raucously as he jerked it up and flung open the door. Magda was standing by the window, the soft glow of the westering sun falling about her. Dan’s eyes rested hungrily on the small dark head outlined against the tender light.

“Why–Dan—-” She faltered into tremulous silence before the look on his face–the aching demand of it.

The huskily sweet voice robbed him of his strength. He strode forward and caught her in his arms, staring down at her with burning eyes. Then, almost violently, he thrust her away from him, unkissed, although the soft curved lips had for a moment lain so maddeningly near his own.

“When can you and Mrs. Grey make it convenient to leave Stockleigh Farm?” he asked, his voice like iron.

The crudeness of it whipped her pride–that pride which Michael had torn down and trampled on–into fresh, indignant life.

“To leave? Why should we leave?”

Storran’s face was white under his tan.

“Because,” he said hoarsely, “because you’re coming between me and my wife. That’s why.”

CHAPTER XIV

THE MOONLIT GARDEN

The chintzy bedroom under the sloping roof was very still and quiet. The moonlight, streaming in through the open casement, revealed the bed unoccupied, its top-sheet neatly folded back just as when June had made her final round of the house some hours earlier, leaving everything in order for the night.

Magda, crouched by the window, glanced back at it indifferently. She did not want to go to bed. If she went, she knew she would not sleep. She felt as though she would never sleep again.

She had no idea of the time. She might have been there half an hour or half eternity–she did not know which. The little sounds of movement in the different bedrooms had gradually died down into silence, until at least the profound tranquillity and peace of night enshrouded the whole house. Only for her there was neither tranquility nor peace.

She was alone now, face to face with the news which Davilof had brought her–the news of Michael’s marriage. Throughout the rest of the day, after Davilof had gone, she had forced the matter into the background of her thoughts, and during supper she had kept up a light- hearted ripple of talk and laughter which had deceived even Gillian, convincing her that her apprehensions of the afternoon were unfounded.

Perhaps she was helped by the fact that Dan failed to put in an appearance at the supper-table. It was easier to scintillate successfully for the sole benefit of a couple of other women than under the eyes of a man who had just ordered you out of his life. But when at last she was alone in her own room, the sparkle was suddenly quenched. There was no longer any need to pretend.

Michael was married! Married! And the bitterness which she had been strenuously keeping at bay since the day, months ago now, when she had learned from Lady Arabella that he had deliberately left England without seeing her again swept over her in a black flood.

It had hurt her badly enough when he had gone away, but somewhere in the depths of her consciousness there had always lurked a little fugitive hope that he would come back–that she would be given another chance. Now she knew that he would never come back–that one isn’t always given a second chance in this world.

And beneath the sick anguish of the realisation she was aware of a fierce resentment–a bitter, rebellious anger that any man could make her suffer as she was suffering now. It was unjust–a burden that had been forced upon her unfairly. She could not help her own character– that was a heritage with which one comes into the world–and now she was being punished for simply having been herself!

An hour–two hours crept by. Hours of black, stark misery. The clock in the hall struck one–a single, bell-like stroke that reverberated through the silent house. It penetrated the numbed confusion of her mind, rousing her to a sudden recognition of the fact that she had been crouched so long in one position that her limbs were stiff and aching.

She drew herself up to her feet, stretching her cramped muscles. The night was warm and the room felt stiflingly hot. She looked longingly through the window to where the garden lay drenched in moonlight, with cool-looking alleyways of moon-washed paths threading the black gloom of overhanging trees, ebony-edged in the silver light.

She felt as though she could hardly breathe in the confined space of the room. Its low, sloping roof, which she had thought so quaintly attractive, seemed to press down on her like the lid of a box. She must get out–out into the black and silver night which beckoned to her through the open window. She could not stay in this room–this little room, alone with her thoughts.

She glanced down dubiously at the soft, chiffony negligee which she had slipped on in place of a frock. Her feet, too, were bare. She had stripped off her shoes and stockings first thing upon coming upstairs, for the sake of coolness. Certainly her attire was not quite suitable for out-of-doors. . . . But there would be no one to see her. Ashencombe folk did not take their walks abroad at that hour of the night. And she longed to feel the cool touch of the dewy grass against her feet.

Very quietly she opened her door and stole out into the passage. The house was strangely, wonderfully still. Only the ticking of the hall- clock broke the silence. So lightly that not a board creaked beneath her step, Magda flitted down the old stairway, and, crossing the hall, felt gingerly for the massive bolt which barred the heavy oaken door. She wondered if it would slide back quietly; she rather doubted it. She remembered often enough having heard it grate into its place as Storran went his nightly round, locking up the house. But, as her slender, seeking fingers came in contact with the knob, she realised that to-night by some oversight he had forgotten to shoot the bolt and, noiselessly lifting the iron latch, she opened the door and slipped out into the moonlit garden. Down the paths she went and across the lawns, the touch of the earth coming clean and cool to her bare feet. Now and again she paused to draw a long breath of the night air, fresh and sweet with the lingering scents of the day’s blooming.

An arch of rambler roses led into the distant part of the garden towards which she was wending her way, its powdering of tiny blossoms gleaming like star clusters borrowed from the Milky Way. Magda stooped as she passed beneath it to avoid an overhanging branch. Then, as she straightened herself, lifting her head once more, she stood still, suddenly arrested. On a stone bench, barely twenty yards away, sat Dan Storran!

Against the pallid ghost-white of the bench his motionless figure showed black and sombre like some sable statue. His big shoulders were bowed, his hands hung loosely clasped between his knees, the white mask of his face, mercilessly revealed in the clear moonlight, was twisted into harsh lines of mental conflict. A certain grim triumph manifested itself in the set of his mouth and out-thrust jaw.

He did not see the slight figure standing just within the shade of the rose-twined arch, and Magda remained for a moment or two watching him in silence. The unbarred door was explained now. Storran had not come in at all that night. She guessed the struggle which had sent him forth to seek the utter solitude of the garden. Almost she thought she could divine the processes of thought which had closed his lips in that strange line of ironic triumph. He had told her to go–when every nerve of him ached to bid her stay. And he was glad that the strength in him had won.

A bitter smile flitted across her face. Men were all the same! They idolised a woman just because she was beautiful–for her lips and eyes and hair and the nameless charm that was in her–and set her up on an altar at which they could kneel becomingly. Then, when they found she was merely an ordinary human being like themselves, with her bundle of faults and failings, hereditary and acquired, the prig in them was appropriately shocked–and they went away!

An unhappy woman is very often a bitter one. And Magda had been slowly learning the meaning of unhappiness for the first time in her life–a life that had been hitherto roses and laurel all the way.

The devils that lie in wait for our weak moments prompted her then. The bitterness faded from her lips and they curved in a smile that subtly challenged the stern decision in Dan Storran’s face. She hesitated an instant. Then, with feet that scarcely seemed to brush the grass, she glided forward, swaying, bending to some rhythmic measure, floating spirit-like across the lawn.

With a great cry Dan leaped to his feet and stared at her, transfixed. At the sound of his voice she paused, poised on one bare foot, leaning a little towards him with curving, outstretched arms. Then, before he could touch her, she drew away, step by step, and Dan Storran, standing there in tense, breathless silence, beheld what no one else had ever seen–the Wielitzska dancing in the moonlight as she alone could dance.

He knew nothing of art, nor of the supreme technique which went to make each supple movement a thing of sheer perfection, instinct with rhythm and significance. But he was a man, and a man in love, fighting the strongest instincts of his nature; and the bewildering beauty of her as she danced, the languorous, ethereal allure, delicately sensuous as the fragrance of a La France rose, sent the hot blood rioting through his veins. . . . She was going–slowly retreating from him. The primal man in him, the innate hunter who took his mate by capture, swept him headlong. With a bound he sprang past the dusky shrubbery that hedged the lawn and overtook her, catching her in his arms. She did not struggle. He felt her yield, and strained the soft, panting body closer to him. Beneath his hand he could feel the hurrying beat of her heart. Her breath, quickened by the exertion of the dance, came unevenly between her lips as she smiled at him.

“Do you still want me to go away, Dan Storran?”

There was a note of half-amused, half-triumphant mockery in her voice. The last bonds that held him snapped suddenly: “Yes!” he cried hoarsely. “Yes, I do. To go away with me!”

He crushed his mouth down on hers, draining the sweetness of her in burning kisses he had thwarted through all these weeks that they had been together, pouring out his love in disjointed, stumbling phrases which halted by very reason of the force of passion which evoked them.

Frightened by the tempest of emotion she had aroused she strained away from him. But she was powerless against his huge strength, helpless to resist him.

At length the fierce tensity of his grip relaxed, though his arms still clasped her.

“Tell me,” he commanded triumphantly. “Tell me you love me. I want to hear it!” His voice vibrated and his eyes sought her face hungrily.

She summoned up all her forces to deny him–to deny him in such a manner that he should realise his mistake absolutely and at once. “But I don’t! I don’t love you! If you thought that, you misunderstood me.”

His hands released their hold of her and fell heavily to his sides. “Misunderstood?” he muttered. The glad triumph went suddenly out of his voice. “Misunderstood?” he repeated dully.

“Yes. Misunderstood me altogether.”

“I don’t believe it!”

“But you /must/ believe it,” she insisted. “It’s the truth!”

He stared at her.

“Then what have you meant all these weeks?”

“I’ve not meant anything.”

“It’s a lie!” he gave back savagely. “Unless”–he came closer to her– “unless–is it that man, that damned foreigner, who was here to-day?”

“Antoine? No. Oh, Dan”–she forced an uncertain little laugh to her lips–“if you knew me better you’d know that I never /do/–‘mean anything’!”

The bitter intonation in her voice–the gibe at her own poor ruins of love fallen about her–was lost on him. He was in total ignorance of her friendship with Quarrington. But the plain significance of her words came home to him clearly enough. He did not speak for a minute or two. Then: “You’ve been playing with me, then–fooling me?” he said heavily.

Magda remained silent. The heavy, laboured speech seemed to hold something minatory in it–the sullen lowering which precedes a tempest.

“Answer me!” he persisted. “Was that it?”

“I–I suppose it was,” she faltered.

He drew still closer and instinctively she shrank away. A consciousness of repressed violence communicated itself to her. She half expected him to strike her.

“And you don’t love me? You’re quite sure?”

There was an ominous kind of patience in the persistent questioning. It was as though he were deliberately giving her every possible chance to clear herself. Her nerves frayed a little.

“Of course I’m sure–perfectly sure,” she said with nervous asperity. “I wish you’d believe me, Dan!”

“I only wanted to make sure,” he returned.

Something in the careful precision of his answer struck her with a swift sense of apprehension. She looked up at him and what she saw made her catch her breath convulsively. His face was ashen, the veins in his forehead standing out like weals, and his eyes gleamed like blue flame–mad eyes. His hands, hanging at his sides, twitched curiously.

“I’m sure now,” he said. “Sure. . . . Do you know what you’ve done? You’ve smashed up my life. Smashed it. June and I were happy enough till you came. Now we’ll never be happy again. I expect you’ve smashed other lives, too. But you won’t do it any more. I’m the last. Women like you are better dead!”

His great arms swung out and gripped her.

“No, don’t struggle. It wouldn’t be any good, you know.” He went on speaking very carefully and quietly, and while he spoke she felt his left arm tighten round her, binding her own arms down to her sides as might a thong, while his right hand slid up to the base of her throat. She writhed, twisting her body desperately in his grip. “Keep still. I’ve kissed you. And now I’m going to kill you. You’ll be better dead.”

There was implacable purpose in his strangely quiet, unhurried accents. Magda recognised it–recognised that death was very close to her. It would be useless to scream. Before help could come–if anyone heard her cries, which was unlikely–Dan would have accomplished what he meant to do.

In the last fraction of time these thoughts flashed through her mind. Her brain seemed to be working with abnormal clarity and speed. This was death, then–unavoidable, inevitable.

She felt Dan’s hand creep upward, closing round her throat. Quite suddenly she ceased to struggle and lay still in his grasp. After all, she didn’t know that she would much mind dying. Life was not so sweet. There would be pain, she supposed . . . a moment’s agony. . . .

All at once, Storran’s hands fell away from her passive, silent body and he stepped back. “I can’t do it!” he muttered hoarsely. “I can’t do it!”

For a moment the suddenness of her release left Magda swaying dizzily on her feet. Then her brain clearing, she looked across to where Dan Storran’s big figure faced her. The nonchalance with which she usually met life, and with which a few moments earlier she had been prepared to face inevitable death, stood by her now. A faint, quizzical smile tilted her mouth.

“So you couldn’t do it after all, Dan?” The familiar note of half- indifferent mockery sounded in her voice.

Storran stared at her. “By God! I don’t believe you are a woman!” he exclaimed thickly.

She regarded him contemplatively, her hands lightly touching the red marks scored by his fingers on the whiteness of her throat.

“Do you know,” she replied dispassionately, “I sometimes wonder if I am? I don’t seem to have–feelings, like other women. It doesn’t matter to me, really, a bit that I’ve–what was it you said?–smashed up your life. I don’t know that it would have mattered much if you had strangled me.” She paused, then stepped towards him. “Now you know the truth. Do you still want to kill me, Dan Storran! . . . Or may I go?”

He swung aside from her.

“Go!” he muttered sullenly. “Go to /hell/!”

CHAPTER XV

THE DAY AFTER

“Magda, how could you?” Gillian’s voice was full of blank dismay. “You ought to be thoroughly ashamed of yourself!”

Magda perched on the foot of Gillian’s bed, her hands clasped round her knees, nodded.

“Yes, I suppose I ought. I don’t know what made me do it–except that he’d suggested I should leave Stockleigh! I’m not used to being– shunted!”

“Heaven knows you’re not!” agreed Gillian ruefully. “It would be a wholesome tonic for you if you were. I told you only yesterday that it would be better if we left here. And on top of that you must needs go and dance in the moonlight, of all things, while Dan Storran looks on! What ordinary man is going to keep his head in such circumstances, do you suppose? Especially when he was more than half in love with you to start with. . . . Oh, I should like to shake you!”

“Well, I’ll leave now–as soon as ever you like,” replied Magda, slipping down from the bed. She was unwontedly meek, from which Gillian judged that for once she felt herself unable to cope with the situation she had created. “Will you arrange it?”

Gillian shrugged her shoulders.

“I suppose so,” she returned resignedly. “As usual, you break the crockery and someone else has to sweep up the pieces.”

Magda bent down and kissed her.

“You’re such a dear, Gillyflower,” she said with that impulsive, lovable charm of manner which it was so difficult to resist. “Still”– her voice hardening a little–“perhaps there are a few odd bits that I’ll have to sweep up myself.”

And she departed to her own room to complete her morning toilette, leaving Gillian wondering rather anxiously what she could have meant.

When, half an hour later, the two girls descended for breakfast, Dan Storran was not visible. He had gone off early to work, June explained, and Magda experienced a sensation of distinct relief. She had dreaded meeting Dan this morning. The mad, bizarre scene of the night before, with sudden unleashing of savage and ungoverned passions, had shaken even her insouciant poise, though she was very far from seeing it in its true proportions.

June received Gillian’s intimation that they proposed leaving Stockleigh Farm that day without comment. She was very quiet and self- contained, and busied herself in making the necessary arrangements for their departure, sending a boy into Ashencombe to order the wagonette from the Crown and Bells to take them to the station whilst she herself laboriously made out the account that was owing. When she presented the latter, with a perfectly composed and business-like air, and proceeded conscientiously to stamp and receipt it, no one could have guessed how bitter a thing it was to her to accept Miss Vallincourt’s money. Within herself she recognised that every penny of it had been earned at the cost of her own happiness.

But as she stood at the gate, watching the ancient vehicle from the Crown and Bells bearing the London visitors towards the station, a little quiver of hope stirred in her heart. Early that morning Dan himself had said to her before starting out to his work: “Get those people away! They must be out of the house before I come into it again. Pay them a week’s money instead of notice if necessary. We can afford it.” So it was evident that he, too, had realised the danger of their happiness–hers and his–if Miss Vallincourt remained at Stockleigh any longer.

He did not come in till late in the evening, when June was sitting in the lamplight, adding delicate stitchery to some tiny garments upon which she was at work. She hid them hastily at the sound of his footsteps, substituting one of his own socks that stood in need of repair. Not yet could she share with him that wonderful secret joy which was hers. There must be a clearer understanding between them first. They must get back to where they were before Miss Vallincourt came between them, so that nothing might mar the sweetness of the telling.

Presently Dan came into the room and sat down heavily. June looked across at him.

“She has gone, Dan,” she said quietly. She did not use the word “they.” Those others did not count as far as she was concerned. Her use of the pronoun sounded significantly in Storran’s ears.

“You know, then?” he said dully. Adding, after a moment’s pause. “Did she tell you?”

“Tell me?” repeated June doubtfully. “Tell me what?”

“That she’s robbed you of all that belongs to you.”

Her face blanched. “What do you mean, Dan?” she asked falteringly. “I don’t think I understand.”

Her wide, questioning blue eyes, with that softness and depth of expression dawning in them which motherhood gives to women’s eyes, searched his face. The innocent appeal of them cut him to the heart. He had loved his wife; and now he had to tell her that he loved her no longer.

“You’ve got to understand,” he said roughly. His hatred of being compelled to hurt her made him almost brutal. “I–everything is changed between us, June.” He stopped, not knowing how to go on.

“Changed? How, Dan?” Her voice sharpened with apprehension. “Do you mean–that you don’t–care any longer?”

“Yes. It’s that. It’s Magda–Oh, good God! Can’t you understand?”

“You love Miss Vallincourt?” June spoke in carefully measured accents. She felt that if she did not speak very quietly indeed she should scream. She wanted to laugh, too. It sounded so absurd to be asking her husband if he loved Miss Vallincourt!

Dan’s eyes met her own.

“Yes,” he said. “I love her.” He paused a moment, then added: “I asked her to go away with me.”

June stared at him dumbly. The whole thing seemed unreal. She could not feel as though what Dan was saying had any relation to herself, any bearing on their life together. At last:

“Why didn’t you go, then?” she heard herself say–at least, she supposed she must be saying it, although the voice didn’t sound a bit like her own.

Dan turned on her with sudden savagery. His nerves were raw.

“You speak as though you were disappointed,” he said roughly.

“No. But if you care for Miss Vallincourt and she cares for you, I’m wondering what stopped you.”

“She doesn’t care for me”–shortly.

June felt a thrill of pure joy. If Magda didn’t care, then she could win him back–win back her husband! Within her she was instinctively aware that if Magda /had/ cared, no power of hers could have won back Dan’s allegiance. A faint doubt assailed her.

“She–she /seemed/ as if she cared?” she ventured.

Dan nodded indifferently.

“Yes. I was a summer holiday’s amusement for her.”

“And–was that all?”

As June spoke, her direct gaze sought her husband’s face. He met it fair and square, unflinchingly.

“That’s all,” he replied quietly.

She crossed the room swiftly to his side.

“Then, if that’s all, Dan, we–we won’t speak of it again–ever,” she said steadily. “It–it was just a mistake. It need never come between us. You’ll get over it, and I”–her small head reared itself bravely– “I’ll forget it.”

The pathetic courage of her! Storran turned away with a groan.

“No,” he answered. “I shan’t ‘get over it.’ When a man loves a woman as I love Magda he doesn’t ‘get over it.’ That’s what I meant when I told you she had robbed you.”

“You /will/ get over it, Dan,” she persisted. “I’ll help you.”

“You can’t,” he returned doggedly. “You, least of all! Every touch of your hand–I should be thinking what her touch would have meant! The sound of your step–I’d be listening for hers!”

He saw her wince. He wanted to kick himself for hurting her like this. But he knew what he intended doing; and sooner or later she must know too. It would be better for her in the long run to face it now than to be endlessly waiting and hoping and longing for what he knew could never be.

“Dan, I’ll be very patient. Don’t you think–if you tried–you could conquer this love of yours for Miss Vallincourt?”

He shook his head.

“It’s conquered me, June. It’s–it’s torture!”

“It will be easier now she’s gone away,” she suggested.

“Gone away? . . . Aye, as far as London! And in five hours I could be with her–see her again—-“

He broke off. At the bare thought his heart was pounding against his ribs, his breath labouring in his throat.

“Won’t you try, Dan?” Even to herself June’s voice sounded faint and far away.

“It would be useless.” He got up and strode aimlessly back and forth, coming at last to a standstill in front of her. “A man knows his own limits, June. And I’ve reached mine. England can’t hold the two of us.”

June gave a little stifled cry.

“What do you mean? You’re not–you’re not going to leave me? To go abroad–now?”

There would be need for him in England soon–in a few months. But of course he couldn’t know that. Should she tell him. Tell him why he /must not/ leave her now? Keep him with her by a sure and certain chain–the knowledge that she was soon to be the mother of his child?

She debated the question wildly in her mind, tempted to tell him, yet feeling that even if then he stayed with her it would not be because he loved her or had ceased to care for Miss Vallincourt, but only because he was impelled by a sense of duty. And her pride rebelled against holding him by that.

His voice broke in upon her conflicting thoughts.

“Yes. I’m going abroad. It’s the only thing, June. I can’t stay in England–and keep away from her.”

June was silent a moment. Then she said in a very low voice, almost as though speaking to herself:

“I wonder if–if you ever loved me.”

He wheeled round, and the desperate misery in his eyes hurt her almost physically.

“Yes,” he said harshly. “I did love you. In a way, I do now. But it’s nothing–nothing to the madness in my blood! I’m a brute to leave you. But I’m going to do it. No civilised country can hold me now!”

So that was to be the end of it! June recognised the bitter truth at last. Magda had indeed robbed her of everything she possessed. And robbed her wantonly, seeing that she herself set no value on Dan’s love–had, in fact, tossed it aside like an outworn plaything.

June ceased to plead with Dan then. She would not wish to hold him by any other chain than his love for her. And if that chain had snapped– broken irrevocably–then the child born of what had once been love would only be an encumbrance in his eyes, an unwelcome tie, shackling him to a duty from which he longed to escape.

So she let him go–let him go in silence. . . .

CHAPTER XVI

WHAT LADY ARABELLA KNEW

Lady Arabella might disapprove of her god-daughter from every point of the compass, but she was nevertheless amazingly fond of her, so that when Gillian appeared on her spotless Park Lane doorstep one afternoon with the information that she and Magda had returned from Devonshire, she hailed the announcement with enthusiasm.

“But where is Magda? Why didn’t she come with you?” she demanded impatiently.

“Her manager rang up to know if he could see her about various things in connection with this next winter’s season, so there’s a great council in progress. But she’s coming to see you to-morrow. Won’t I do”–Gillian wrinkled her brows whimsically–“for to-day?”

“Bless the child! Of course you will! Come along and tell me all about your Devonshire trip. I suppose,” she went on, “you heard the news of Michael Quarrington’s marriage? Or didn’t you get any newspapers down in your benighted village?”

“No, we had no London papers,” replied Gillian doubtfully. “But–I don’t understand. Mr. Quarrington isn’t married, is he? I thought–I thought—-“

“You thought he was in love with Magda. So he was. The announcement startled everybody, I can tell you! And Davilof promptly decided that a motoring trip would benefit his health and shot off to Devonshire at top speed. Of course he wanted to impart the news to Magda. He must have felt a pretty fool since!” And Lady Arabella gave one of her enjoyable chuckles.

“Yes. Antoine came down to see us,” replied Gillian in puzzled tones. “But Magda never confided anything special he had said. I suppose he /must/ have told her—-” She broke off as all at once illumination penetrated the darkness. “That explains it, then! Explains everything!” she exclaimed.

“What explains what?” demanded Lady Arabella bluntly.

“Why—-” And Gillian proceeded to recount the events which had led up to the abrupt termination of the visit to Stockleigh Farm.

“She was in a very odd kind of mood after Antoine had gone. I even asked her if he had brought any bad news, but I couldn’t get any sensible answer out of her. And that night she proceeded to dance in the moonlight with Dan Storran for audience–out of sheer devilment, of course!”

“Or sheer heartsickness,” suggested Lady Arabella, with one of those quick flashes of tender insight which combined so incongruously with the rest of her personality.

“Do you think she–cared, then?” asked Gillian.

“For Quarrington? Of course I do. Oh, well it will all come right in the end, I hope. And, anyway”–with a wicked little grin–“Davilof won’t have quite such a clear coast as he anticipated.”

“But if Michael Quarrington is married–“

“He isn’t,” interrupted Lady Arabella briskly. “It was contradicted in the papers the very next morning. Only I suppose Davilof hustled off to Devonshire in such a hurry that he never saw it.

“Contradicted? But how did such a mistake arise?”

“Oh, whoever supplied that particular tidbit of news got the names mixed. It ought really to have been /Warrington/, not Quarrington– Mortrake Warrington, the sculptor, you know. It seems he and Michael were both using the same woman as a model–only Warrington married her! Spoiled Michael’s picture–or his temper–when he ran off with her for a honeymoon, I expect!”

On her return to Friars’ Holm Gillian hastened to retail for Magda’s benefit the information she had acquired from Lady Arabella, and was rewarded by the immediate change in her which became apparent. The haunted, feverish look in her eyes was replaced by a more tranquil shining, the intense restlessness she had evinced of late seemed to fall away from her, and she ceased to pepper her conversation with the bitter speeches which had worried Gillian more than a little, recognising in them, as she did, the outcrop of some inward and spiritual turmoil.

To Magda, the fact that Michael was not married, after all, seemed to re-create the whole world. It left hope still at the bottom of the box of life’s possibilities. Looking backward, she realised now how strongly she had clung to the belief that some day he would come back to her. It had been the one gleam of light through all those dark months which had followed his abrupt departure; and the intolerable pain of the hours that had succeeded Davilof’s announcement of his marriage to the Spanish woman had taught her how much Michael meant to her.

She was beginning to appreciate, too, the tangle of convictions and emotions which had driven him from her side. His original attitude toward her, based on the treatment she had accorded to his friend who had loved her, had been one of plain censure and distrust, strengthened and intensified by that strong “partisan” feeling of one man for another–fruit of the ineradicable sex antagonism which so often colours the judgments men pass on women and women on men. Then had come love, against which he had striven in vain, and gradually, out of love, had grown a new tentative belief which the pitiful culmination of the Raynham episode had suddenly and very completely shattered.

Of late, circumstances had combined to impress on Magda an altogether new point of view–the viewpoint from which other people might conceivably regard her actions. She had never troubled about such a thing before, nor was she finding the experience at all a pleasant one. But it helped her to understand to a certain extent–though still only in a very modified degree–the influences which had sent Michael Quarrington out of England.

And now, in the passionate relief bred of the knowledge that he was still free, that he had not gone straight from her to another woman, much of the resentful hardness which had embittered her during the last few months melted away, and she became once more the nonchalant, tantalising but withal lovable and charming personality of former days.

She was even conscious of a certain compunction for her behaviour at Stockleigh. She had been bitterly hurt herself, and since, for the moment, to experiment with a new and, to her, quite unknown type of man had amused her and helped to distract her thoughts, she had not paused to consider the possible resultant consequences to the subject of the experiment.

She endeavoured to solace herself with the belief that after she had gone he would instinctively turn to June once more, and that life on the farm would probably resume the even tenor of its way. Gradually, with the passage of time, her thoughts reverted less and less often to the happenings at Stockleigh, and the prickings of conscience–which beset her return to London–grew considerably fainter and more infrequent.

It was almost inevitable that this should be so. With the autumn came the stir and hustle of the season, with its thousand-and-one claims upon her thought and time. The management of the Imperial Theatre was nothing if not enterprising, and designed to present a series of ballets throughout the course of the winter, in the greater number of which Magda would be the bright and particular star. And in the absorption of work and the sheer joy she found in the art which she loved, the recollection of her holiday at Stockleigh slipped by degrees into the background of her mind. Fraught with such immense significance and catastrophe to those others, Dan and June–to Magda it soon came to occupy no more than an incidental niche in her memory.

CHAPTER XVII

CROSS CURRENTS

Winter had slipped away, pushed from his place by the tender, resistless hands of spring. And now spring had given place to summer, and June, arms filled with flowers, was converting the earth into a garden of roses.

Magda’s car, purring its way southward along the great road from London, sped between fields that still gleamed with the first freshness of their young green, while through the open window drifted vagrant little puffs of clean country air, coming delicately to her nostrils, fragrant of leaf and bloom.

She was motoring to Netherway, a delightfully small and insignificant place on the Hampshire coast where Lady Arabella had what it pleased her to term her “cottage in the country,” a charming old place, Elizabethan in character–the type of “cottage” which boasted a score or so of rooms and every convenience which an imaginative estate agent, sustained by the knowledge that his client regarded money as a means and not an end, could devise.

Summer invitations to the Hermitage–as the place was quite inaptly called, since no one could be less akin to a hermit than its gregarious owner–were much sought after by the younger generation of Lady Arabella’s set. The beautifully wooded park, with its green aisles of shady solitude sloping down from the house to the very edge of the blue waters of the Solent, was an ideal spot in which to bring to a safe and happy conclusion a love affair that might seem to have hung fire a trifle during the hurly-burly of the London season. And if further inducement were needed, it was to be found in the fact that Lady Arabella herself constituted the most desirable of chaperons, remaining considerately inconspicuous until the moment when her congratulations were requested.

This year a considerable amount of disappointment had been occasioned by the fact that she had left town quite early during the season, and later on had apparently limited her invitations exclusively to the trio at Friars’ Holm. She declared that the number of matrimonial ventures for which the Hermitage was responsible was beginning to weigh on her conscience. Also, she wanted a quiet holiday and she proposed to take one.

And now Magda was on her way to join her, Gillian remaining behind in order to close up the house at Hampstead and settle the servants on board wages. It had been arranged that she and Coppertop should come on to Netherway immediately this was accomplished.

Magda could hardly believe that only a year had elapsed since last the roses beckoned her out of London. It seemed far longer since that hot summer’s day when she had rushed away to Devonshire, vainly seeking a narcotic for the new and bewildering turmoil of pain that was besetting her.

She had learned now that you carry a heartache with you, and that no change of scenery makes up for the beloved face you can no longer see. For Michael had not come back. He had remained abroad and had never by sign or letter acknowledged that he even remembered her existence. Magda had come to accept it as a fact now that he had gone out of her life entirely.

A whiff of air tinged with the salt tang of the sea blew in at the window, and she came suddenly out of her musings to find that the car was winding its way up the hill upon which the Hermitage was perched.

A long, low house, clothed in creeper, it stood just below the hill’s brow, sheltered to the rear by a great belt of woods, and overlooking a sea which sparkled in the sunlight as though strewn with diamond- dust.

Lady Arabella was waiting in the porch when the car drew up and welcomed her god-daughter with delight. She seemed bubbling over with good spirits, and there was a half-mischievous, half-guilty twinkle in her keen old eyes which suggested that there might be some ulterior cause for her effervescence.

“If you were poor I should say you’d just come into a fortune,” commented Magda, regarding her judicially. “As you’re not, I should like to know why you’re looking as pleased as a child with a new toy. Own up, now, Marraine! What’s the secret you’ve got up your sleeve?”

“Yes, there is a secret,” acknowledged Lady Arabella gleefully. “Come along and I’ll show it you.”

Magda smiled and followed her across the long hall and into a room at the further end of which stood a big easel. On the easel, just nearing completion, rested a portrait of her godmother. It was rather a wonderful portrait. The artist seemed to have penetrated beyond the mere physical lineaments of his sitter into the very crannies of her soul. It was all there–the thoroughly worldly shrewdness, the mordant, somewhat cynical humour, and the genuine kindness of heart which went to make up Lady Arabella’s personality as her world knew it. And something more. Behind all these one sensed the glamour of a long-past romance, the unquenched spark of a faith that, as Lady Arabella had herself once put it in a rare moment of self-revelation, “love is the best thing this queer old world of ours has to offer.” The portrait on the easel was that of a woman who had visioned the miracle of love only to be robbed of its fulfilment.

Magda stood silently in front of the picture, marvelling at its keen perceptive powers. And then quite suddenly she realised who must have painted it. It almost seemed to her as though she had really known it from the first moment her eyes had rested on the canvas. The brushwork, and that uncannily clever characterisation, were unmistakable.

“Good likeness, don’t you think?”

Lady Arabella’s snapping speech broke the silence.

“It’s rather more than that, isn’t it?” said Magda. “How did you seduce Michael Quarrington? I thought”–for an instant her voice wavered, then steadied again–“I thought he was abroad.”

“He was. At the present moment he’s at the Hermitage.”

“/Here/?”

Magda turned her head aside so that Lady Arabella might not see the wave of scarlet which flooded her face and then receded, leaving it milk-white. Michael . . . /here/! She felt her heart beating in great suffocating throbs, and the room seemed to swim round her. If he were here, knowing that she was to be his fellow-guest, surely he could not hate her so badly! She was conscious of a sudden wild uprush of hope. Perhaps–perhaps happiness was not so far away, after all!

And then she heard Lady Arabella’s voice breaking across the riot of emotion which stirred within her.

“Yes, he has been here the last three weeks painting my portrait. It’s for you, the portrait. I thought you’d like to have it when you haven’t got the original any longer.”

Magda turned to her suddenly, her affection for her godmother alertly apprehensive.

“What do you mean?” she said anxiously. “You’re–you’re not ill, Marraine?”

“Ill? No. But I’m over seventy. And after seventy you’ve had your allotted span, you know. Anything beyond that’s an extra. And whether fate gives me a bit more rope or not, I’ve nothing to grumble at. I’ve /lived/, not vegetated–and I’ve had a very good time, too.” She paused, then added slowly: “Though I’ve missed the best.”

Magda slipped her hand into the old woman’s thin, wrinkled one with a quick gesture of understanding, and a little sympathetic silence fell between them.

“Then you’ll find the hanging-room for the portrait at Friars’ Holm?” queried Lady Arabella, breaking it at last in practical tones.

“You know we’d love to have it,” replied Magda warmly. In a studiously casual voice she pursued: “By the way, does Mr. Quarrington know I’m here?”

Lady Arabella nodded. Secretly she was congratulating herself on having successfully tided over the awkwardness of explaining Michael’s presence at the Hermitage. She had been somewhat apprehensive as to how Magda would take it. It was quite on the cards that she might have ordered her car round again and driven straight back to London!

But she had accepted the fact with apparent composure–one’s mental states, fortunately, being invisible to the curious eyes of the outside world!–and Lady Arabella felt proportionately relieved. Nor had Quarrington himself evinced any particular emotion, either of dissatisfaction or otherwise, when she had confided to him the fact that she was expecting her god-daughter. And although the extreme composure exhibited by both Michael and Magda was a trifle baffling, Lady Arabella was fain to comfort herself with her confirmed belief in propinquity as the resolution of most lovers’ problems and misunderstandings.

She was fully determined to bring these two together once more if it were in any way possible, and the commission to paint her portrait had been merely part of her scheme. Her three score years and ten had had little enough to do with it. They weighed extremely lightly on her erect old shoulders, and her spirit was as unquenchable as it had been twenty years ago. It seemed more than likely that fate was preparing to allow her quite a good deal of rope.

As for Quarrington, he would probably have refused to return to England at this juncture to please anyone other than Lady Arabella. But somehow no one ever did refuse Lady Arabella anything that she particularly set her heart upon. Moreover, as he reflected upon receipt of her assured little missive commissioning him to paint her portrait, he would be obliged to return to England sooner or later, and by now he felt he had himself sufficiently in hand to risk the contingency of a possible meeting with Magda. But he had hardly counted upon finding himself actually under the same roof with her for days together, and, although outwardly unmoved, he was somewhat taken aback when halfway through his visit to the Hermitage, Lady Arabella cheerfully communicated the prospect to him.

He could read between the lines and guess her purpose, and it afforded him a certain sardonic amusement. It was like Lady Arabella’s temerity, he reflected! No other woman, knowing as much of the special circumstances as she did, would have ventured so far.

Well, she would soon realise that her attempt to bridge matters over between himself and her god-daughter was foredoomed to failure. He would never trust Magda, or any other woman, again. From the moment he had left England he had made up his mind that henceforth no woman should have any place in his life, and certain subsequent occurrences had confirmed him in this determination.

At the same time he was not going to run away. He would stay and face it out. He would remain at the Hermitage until he had finished the portrait upon which he was at work, and then he would pack up and depart.

So that when finally he and Magda met in the sun-filled South Parlour at the Hermitage each of them was prepared to treat the other with a cool detachment.

But Magda found it difficult to maintain her pose after her first glance at his face. The alteration in it sent a swift pang to her heart. It had hardened–hardened into lines of a grim self-control that spoke of long mental conflict. The mouth, too, had learned to close in a new line of bitterness, and in the grey eyes as they rested on her there lay a certain cynical indifference which seemed to set her as far away from him as the north is from the south. She realised that the gulf between them was almost as wide and impassable as though he were in very truth the Spanish dancer’s husband. This man proposed to give her neither love nor forgiveness. Only the feminine instinct of pride–the pride of woman who must be sought and never the seeker– carried her through the ordeal of the first meeting. Nor did he seek to make it easier for her.

“It is a long time since you were in England,” she remarked after the first interchange of civilities.

“Very long,” agreed Quarrington politely. “It would probably have been still longer if Lady Arabella had not tempted me. But her portrait was too interesting a commission to refuse.”

“It sounds banal to say how good I think it. You never paint anything that /isn’t/ good, do you?”

“I paint what I see.”

“In that case quite a lot of people might be afraid to have their portraits painted by you–beauty being so much in the eye of the beholder!” returned Magda with the flippancy that is so often only the defence behind which a woman takes refuge.

“I don’t think so. As a matter of fact I have no objection to painting a plain face–provided there’s a beautiful soul behind it.”

“But I suppose a beautiful soul in a beautiful body would satisfy you better?”

“It might, if such a combination existed.”

Magda flushed a little.

“You don’t think it does?”

The grey, contemptuous eyes swept her face suddenly.

“My experience has not led me to think so.”

There was an almost calculated insolence in the careless answer. It was as though he had tossed her an epitome of his opinion of her. Magda’s spirit rose in opposition.

“Perhaps your experience has been somewhat limited,” she observed.

“Perhaps it has. If so, I have no wish to extend it.”

In spite of Michael’s taciturnity–or perhaps, more truly, on account of it–Magda’s spirits lightened curiously after that first interview with him. The mere fact of his presence had stilled the incessant ache at her heart–the ache to see him again and hear his voice. And the morose cynicism of his thrusts at her was just so much proof that, although he had forced himself to remain out of England for a year and a half, yet he had not thereby achieved either peace of mind or indifference. Magda was too true a daughter of Eve not to know that a man doesn’t expend powder and shot on a woman to whom he is completely indifferent.

The next day or two were not without their difficulties, as Lady Arabella speedily realised. A triangular party, when two out of the three share certain poignant memories, is by no means the easiest thing to stage-manage. There were inevitable awkward moments that could only be surmounted by the exercise of considerable tact, and the hours which Lady Arabella passed sitting to Quarrington for her