"My tub ready, Virginie?" asked Magda, cheerfully.

Virginie scrambled to her feet.

"Mais oui, mademoiselle. The bath is ready."

Then, her face puckering up suddenly, she burst into tears and ran out of the room. Magda smiled and sighed, then busied herself with her morning ablutions—prolonging them a little as she realised that this was the last occasion for a whole year when she would step down into a bath prepared and perfumed for her in readiness by her maid.

A year! It was a long time to look forward to. So much can happen in a year. And no one can foresee what the end may bring.

Presently she emerged from her bath, her skin gleaming like wet ivory, her dark hair sparkling with the drops of water that had splashed on to it. As she stepped up from its green-veined depths, she caught a glimpse of herself in a panel mirror hung against the wall, and for a moment she was aware of the familiar thrill of delight in her own beauty—in the gleaming, glowing radiance of perfectly formed, perfectly groomed flesh and blood.

Then, with a revulsion of feeling, came the sudden realisation that it was this very perfection of body which had been her undoing—like a bitter blight, leaving in its wake a trail of havoc and desolation. She was even conscious of a fierce eagerness for the period of penance to begin. Almost ecstatically she contemplated the giving of her body to whatever discipline might be appointed.

To anyone hitherto as spoiled and imperious as Magda, whose body had been the actual temple of her art, and so, almost inevitably, of her worship, this utter renouncing of physical self-government was the supremest expiation she could make. As with Hugh Vallincourt, whose blood ran in her veins, the idea of personal renunciation made a curious appeal to her emotional temperament, and she was momentarily filled with something of the martyr's ecstasy.



Gillian's arms clung round Magda's neck convulsively as she kissed her at the great gates of Friars' Holm a few hours later.

"Good-bye! . . . Ah, Magda! Come back to me!"

"I shall come back."

One more lingering kiss, and then Magda stepped into the open car. Virginie made a rush forward before the door closed and, dropping on to her knees on the footboard, convulsively snatched her adored young mistress's hand between her two old worn ones and covered it with kisses.

"Oh, mademoiselle, thy old Virginie will die without thee!" she sobbed brokenly.

And then the car slid away and Magda's last glimpse was of the open gates of Friars' Holm with its old-world garden, stately and formal, in the background; and of Virginie weeping unrestrainedly, her snowy apron flung up over her head; and of Gillian standing erect, her brown eyes very wide and winking away the tears that welled up despite herself, and her hand on Coppertop's small manful shoulder, gripping it hard.

As the car passed through the streets many people, recognising its occupant, stopped and turned to follow it with their eyes. One or two women waved their hands, and a small errand-boy—who had saved up his pennies and squeezed into the gallery of the Imperial Theatre the previous evening—threw up his hat and shouted "Hooray!"

Once, at a crossing, the chauffeur was compelled to pull up to allow the traffic to pass, and a flower-girl with a big basket of early violets on her arm, recognising the famous dancer, tossed a bunch lightly into the car. They fell on Magda's lap. She picked them up and, brushing them with her lips, smiled at the girl and fastened the violets against the furs at her breast. The flower-girl treasured the smile of the great Wielitzska in her memory for many a long day, while in the arid months that were to follow Magda treasured the sweet fragrance of that spontaneous gift.

Half an hour later the doors of the grey house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt apart from the world opened to receive Magda Vallincourt, and closed again behind her.



CHAPTER XXVII

THE GREY VEIL

Magda felt a sudden stab of fear. The sound of the latch clicking into its place brought home to her the irrevocability of the step she had taken. That tall, self-locking door stood henceforth betwixt her and the dear, familiar world she had known—the world of laughter and luxury and success. But beyond, on the far horizon, there was Michael—her "Saint Michel." If these months of discipline brought her nearer him, then she would never grudge them.

The serene eyes of the Sister who received her—Sister Bernardine—helped to steady her quivering pulses.

There was something in Sister Bernardine that was altogether lacking in Catherine Vallincourt—a delightfully human understanding and charity for all human weakness, whether of the soul or body.

It was she who reassured Magda when a sudden appalling and unforeseen idea presented itself to her.

"My hair!" she exclaimed breathlessly, her hand going swiftly to the heavy, smoke-black tresses. "Will they cut off my hair?"

As Sister Bernardine comfortingly explained that only those who joined the community as sisters had their heads shaven, a strange expression flickered for an instant in her eyes, a fleeting reminiscence of that day, five-and-twenty years ago, when the shears had cropped their ruthless way through the glory of hair which had once been hers.

And afterwards, as time went on and Magda, wearing the grey veil and grey serge dress of a voluntary penitent, found herself absorbed into the daily life of the community, it was often only the recollection of Sister Bernardine's serene, kind eyes which helped her to hold out. Somehow, somewhere out of this drastic, self-denying life Sister Bernardine had drawn peace and tranquillity of soul, and Magda clung to this thought when the hard rules of the sisterhood, the distastefulness of the tasks appointed her, and the frequent fasts ordained, chafed and fretted her until sometimes her whole soul seemed to rise up in rebellion against the very discipline she had craved.

Most of her tasks were performed under the lynx eyes of Sister Agnetia, an elderly and sour-visaged sister to whom Magda had taken an instinctive dislike from the outset. The Mother Superior she could tolerate. She was severe and uncompromising. But she was at least honest. There was no doubting the bedrock genuineness of her disciplinary ardour, harsh and merciless though it might appear. But with Sister Agnetia, Magda was always sensible of the personal venom of a little mind vested with authority beyond its deserts, and she resented her dictation accordingly. And equally accordingly, it seemed to fall always to her lot to work under Sister Agnetia's supervision.

Catherine had been quick enough to detect Magda's detestation of this particular sister and to use it as a further means of discipline. It was necessary that Magda's pride and vanity should be humbled, and Catherine saw to it that they were. It was assuredly by the Will of Heaven that the child of Diane Wielitzska had been led to her very doors, and to the subject of her chastening Catherine brought much thought and discrimination. "If you hurt people enough you can make them good." It had been her brother's bitter creed and it was hers. Pain, in Catherine's idea, was the surest means of chastening, and Magda was to remember her year at the sisterhood by two things—by the deadly, unbearable monotony of its daily routine and by her first acquaintance with actual bodily pain.

Her health had always been magnificent, and—with the exception of the trivial punishments of childhood and those few moments when she was sitting for the picture of Circe—physical suffering was unknown to her. The penances, therefore, which Catherine appointed her—to kneel for a stated length of time until it seemed as though every muscle she possessed were stretched to breaking-point, to fast when her whole healthy young body craved for food, to be chastened with flagellum, a scourge of knotted cords—all these grew to be a torment almost beyond endurance.

Almost! . . . Yet in the beginning the thought of Michael sustained her triumphantly.



It was a curious sensation—that first stroke of the flagellum.

As Magda, unversed in physical suffering, felt the cords shock against her flesh, she was conscious of a strange uplifting of spirit. This, then, this smarting, blinding thing called pain, was the force that would drive the will to do evil out of her soul.

She waited expectantly—almost exultantly—for the second fall of the thongs. The interval between seemed endless. Sister Agnetia was very deliberate, pausing between each stroke. She knew to a nicety the value of anticipation as a remedial force in punishment.

Again the cords descended on the bared shoulders. Magda winced away from them, shivering. For a moment Sister Agnetia's arm hung flaccid, the cords of the flagellum pendant and still.

"Are you submitting to the discipline, Sister Penitentia?" came her voice. It was an unpleasant voice, suggestive of a knife that has been dipped in oil.

Magda caught her breath.

"Yes . . . yes . . . I submit myself."

Dimly she felt that by means of this endurance she would win back Michael, cleanse herself to receive his love.

"I submit," she repeated in a rapt whisper of self-surrender.

Sister Agnetia's voice swam unctuously into her consciousness once more.

"I thought you tried to avoid that last stroke. If you flinch from punishment it is not submission, but rebellion."

Magda gripped her hands together and pressed her knees into the hard stone floor, her muscles taut with anticipation as she heard the soft whistle of the thongs cleaving the air.

This time she bore the pang of anguish motionless, but the vision of Michael went out suddenly in a throbbing darkness of swift agony. Her shoulders felt red-hot. The pain shot up into her brain like fingers of flame. It clasped her whole body in a torment, and the ecstasy of self-surrender was lost in a sick groping after sheer endurance.

The next stroke, crushing across that fever of intolerable suffering, wrung a hoarse moan from her dry lips. Her hands locked together till she felt as though their bones must crack with the strain as she waited for the next inexorable stroke.

One moment! . . . Two! An eternity of waiting!

"Go on!" she breathed. "Oh! . . . Be quick . . ." Her voice panted.

No movement answered her. Unable to endure the suspense, she straightened her bowed shoulders and turned in convulsive appeal to where she had glimpsed the flail-like rise and fall of Sister Agnetia's serge-clad arm.

There was no one there! The bare, cell-like chamber was empty, save for herself. Sister Agnetia had stolen away, completing the penance of physical pain by the refinement of anguish embodied in those hideous moments of mental dread.

Magda almost fancied she could hear an oily chuckle outside the door.



CHAPTER XXVIII

THOSE THAT WERE LEFT BEHIND

For the first month or two after Magda's departure Gillian found that she had her hands full in settling up various business and personal matters which had been left with loose ends. She was frankly glad to discover that there were so many matters requiring her attention; otherwise the blank occasioned in her life by Magda's absence would have been almost unendurable.

The two girls had grown very much into each other's hearts during the years they had shared together, and when friends part, no matter how big a wrench the separation may mean to the one who goes, there is a special kind of sadness reserved for the one who is left behind. For the one who sets out there are fresh faces, new activities in store. Even though the new life adventured upon may not prove to be precisely a bed of thornless roses, the pricking of the thorns provides distraction to the mind from the sheer, undiluted pain of separation.

But for Gillian, left behind at Friars' Holm, there remained nothing but an hourly sense of loss added to that crushing, inevitable flatness which succeeds a crisis of any kind.

Nor did a forlorn Coppertop's reiterated inquiries as to how soon the Fairy Lady might be expected back again help to mend matters.

Lady Arabella's grief was expressed in a characteristically prickly fashion.

"Young people don't seem to know the first thing about love nowadays," she observed with the customary scathing contempt of one age for another.

In my young days! Ah! there will never be times like those again! We are all quite sure of it as our young days recede into the misty past.

"If you loved, you loved," pursued Lady Arabella crisply. "And the death of half a dozen sisters wouldn't have been allowed to interfere with the proceedings."

Gillian smiled a little.

"It wasn't only that. It was Michael's bitter disappointment in Magda, I think, quite as much as the fact that, indirectly, he held her responsible for June's death."

"It's ridiculous to try and foist Mrs. Storran's death on to Magda," fumed Lady Arabella restively. "If she hadn't the physical health to have a good, hearty baby successfully, she shouldn't have attempted it. That's all! . . . And then those two idiots—Magda and Michael! Of course he must needs shoot off abroad, and equally of course she must be out of the way in a sisterhood when he comes rushing back—as he will do!"—with a grim smile.

"He hasn't done yet," Gillian pointed out.

"I give him precisely six months, my dear, before he finds out that, sister or no sister, he can't live without Magda. Michael Quarrington's got too much good red blood in his veins to live the life of a hermit. He's a man, thank goodness, not a mystical dreamer like Hugh Vallincourt. And he'll come back to his mate as surely as the sun will rise to-morrow."

"I wish I felt as confident as you do."

"I wish I could make sure of putting my hand on Magda when he comes," grumbled Lady Arabella. "That's the hitch I'm afraid of! If only she hadn't been so precipitate—only waited a bit for him to come back to her."

"I don't agree with you," rapped out Gillian smartly. "Women are much too ready to do the patient Griselda stunt. I think"—with a vicious little nod of her brown head—"it would do Michael all the good in the world to come back and want Magda—want her badly. And find he couldn't get her! So there!"

Lady Arabella regarded her with astonishment, then broke into a delighted chuckle.

"Upon my word! If a tame dove had suddenly turned round and pecked at me, I couldn't have been more surprised! I didn't know you had so much of the leaven of malice and wickedness in you, Gillian!"

Gillian, a little flushed and feeling, in truth, rather surprised at herself for her sudden heat, smiled back at her.

"But I should have thought your opinion would have been very much the same as mine. I never expected you'd want Magda to sit down and twiddle her thumbs till Michael chose to come back to her."

Lady Arabella sighed.

"I don't. Not really. Only I want them to be happy," she said a little sadly. "Love is such a rare thing—love like theirs. And it's hard that Magda should lose the beauty and happiness of it all because of mistakes she made before she found herself, so to speak."

Gillian nodded soberly. Lady Arabella had voiced precisely her own feeling in the matter. It was hard! And yet it was only the fulfilment of the immutable law: Who breaks, pays.

Gillian's thoughts tried to pierce the dim horizon. Perhaps all the pain and mistakes and misunderstandings of which this workaday world is so full are, after all, only a part of the beautiful tapestry which the patient Fingers of God are weaving—a dark and sombre warp, giving value to the gold and silver and jewelled threads of the weft which shall cross it. When the ultimate fabric is woven, and the tissue released from the loom, there will surely be no meaningless thread, sable or silver, in the consummated pattern.

A few weeks after Magda's departure Gillian received a letter from Dan Storran, reminding her of her promise to let him see her and asking if she would lunch with him somewhere in town.

It was with somewhat mixed feelings that she met him again. He was much altered—so changed from the hot-headed, primitive countryman she had first known. Some chance remark of hers enlightened him as to her confused sense of the difference in him, and he smiled across at her.

"I've been through the mill, you see," he explained quietly, "since the Stockleigh days."

The words seemed almost like a key unlocking the door that stands fast shut between one soul and another. He talked to her quite simply and frankly after that, telling her how, after he had left England, the madness in his blood had driven him whither it listed. There had been no depths to which he had not sunk, no wild living from which he had recoiled.

And then had come the news of June's death. Not tenderly conveyed, but charged to his account by her sister with a fierce bitterness that had suddenly torn the veil from his eyes. Followed days and nights of agonised remorse, and after that the slow, steady, infinitely difficult climb back from the depths into which he had allowed himself to sink to a plane of life where, had June still lived, he would not have been ashamed to meet her eyes nor utterly unworthy to take her hand.

"It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do," he ended. "But she would have wished it. I can never tell her now how I regret, never ask her forgiveness. And this was the only thing I could do to atone."

Gillian's eyes were very soft as she answered:

"I expect she knows, Dan, and is glad."

After a moment she went on thoughtfully.

"It's rather the same kind of feeling that has driven Magda into a sisterhood, I think—the desire to do something definite, something tangible, as a sort of reparation. And a woman is much more limited that way than a man."

Storran's mouth hardened. Any mention of Magda would bring that look of concentrated hardness into his face, and as the months went on, giving Gillian a closer insight into the man, she began to realise that he had never forgiven Magda for her share in the ruin of his life. On this point he was as hard as nether millstone. He even seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from the knowledge that she was paying, and paying heavily, for all the harm she had wrought.

It troubled Gillian—this incalculable hardness in Dan's nature towards one woman. She found him kindly and tolerant in his outlook on life—with the understanding tolerance of the man who has dragged himself out of the pit by his own sheer force of will, and who, knowing the power of temptation, is ready to give a helping hand to others who may have fallen by the way. So that his relentlessness towards Magda was the more inexplicable.

More than once she tried to soften his attitude, tried to make him realise something of the conflicting influences both of temperament and environment which had helped to make Magda what she was. But he remained stubbornly unmoved.

"No punishment is too severe for a woman who has done what Magda Vallincourt has done. She has wrecked lives simply in order to gratify her vanity and insensate instinct for conquest."

Gillian shook her head.

"No, you're wrong. You won't understand! It's all that went before—her parents' mistakes—that should be blamed for half she's done. I think you're very merciless, Dan."

"Perhaps I am—in this case. Frankly, if I could lessen her punishment by lifting my little finger—I wouldn't do it."

Yet this same man when, as often happened, he took Gillian and Coppertop for a run into the country in his car, was as simple and considerate and kindly as a man could be. Coppertop adored him, and, as Gillian reflected, the love of children is rarely misplaced. Some instinct leads them to divine unfailingly which is gold and which dross.

The car was a recent acquisition. As Storran himself expressed it, rather bitterly: "Now that I can't buy a ha'p'orth of happiness with the money, my luck has turned." He explained to Gillian that after he had left England he had sold his farm in Devonshire, and that a lucky investment of the capital thus realised had turned him into a comparatively rich man.

"Even when I was making ducks and drakes of my life generally, I didn't seem to make a mistake over money matters. If I played cards, I won; if I backed a horse, he romped in first; it I bought shares, they jumped up immediately."

"What a pity!" replied Gillian ingenuously. "If only your financial affairs hadn't prospered, you'd have had to settle down and work—instead of—of——"

"Playing the fool," he supplemented. "No, I don't suppose I should. I hadn't learned—then—that work is the only panacea, the one big remedy."

"And now?"

"I've learned a lot of things in the last two years," quietly. "And I'm still learning."

As the months went on, Dan's friendship began to mean a good deal to Gillian. It had come into her life just at a time when she was intolerably lonely, and quite unconsciously she was learning to turn to him for advice on all the large and small affairs of daily life as they came cropping up.

She was infinitely glad of his counsel with regard to Coppertop, who was growing to the age when the want of a father—of a man's broad outlook and a man's restraining hand—became an acute lack in a boy's life. And to Gillian, who had gallantly faced the world alone since the day when death had abruptly ended her "year of utter happiness," it was inexpressibly sweet to be once more shielded and helped in all the big and little ways in which a man—even if he was only a staunch man-friend—can shield and help a woman.

It seemed as though Dan Storran always contrived to interpose his big person betwixt her and the sharp corners of life, and she began to wonder, with a faint, indefinable dread, what must become of their friendship when Magda returned to Friars' Holm. Feeling as he did towards the dancer, it would be impossible for him to come there any more, and somehow a snatched hour here and there—a lunch together, or a motor-spin into the country—would be a very poor substitute for his almost daily visits to the old Queen Anne house tucked away behind its high walls at Hampstead.

Once she broached the subject to him rather diffidently.

"My dear"—he had somehow dropped into the use of the little term of endearment, and Gillian found that she liked it and knew that she would miss it if it were suddenly erased from his speech—"my dear, why cross bridges till we come to them? Perhaps, when the time comes, there'll be no bridge to cross."

Gillian glanced at him swiftly.

"Do you mean that she—that you're feeling less bitter towards her, Dan?" she asked eagerly.

He smiled down at her whimsically.

"I don't quite know. But I know one thing—it's very difficult to be a lot with you and keep one's anger strictly up to concert pitch."

Gillian made no answer. She was too wise—with that intuitive wisdom of woman—to force the pace. If Dan were beginning to relent ever so little towards Magda—why, then, her two best friends might yet come together in comradeship and learn to forget the bitter past. The gentle hand of Time would be laid on old wounds and its touch would surely bring healing. But Gillian would no more have thought of trying to hasten matters than she would have tried to force open the close-curled petals of a flower in bud.



CHAPTER XXIX

THE RETURN

Magda slipped through the tall doorway in the wall which marked the abode of the Sisters of Penitence and stood once more on the pavement of the busy street. The year was over, and just as once before the clicking of the latch had seemed to signify the end of everything, so now it sounded a quite different note—of new beginnings, of release—freedom!

Three months prior to the completion of her allotted span at the sisterhood Magda had had a serious attack of illness. The hard and rigorous life had told upon her physically, while the unaccustomed restrictions, the constant obedience exacted, had gone far towards assisting in the utter collapse of nerves already frayed by the strain of previous happenings.

Probably her fierce determination to go through with her self-elected expiation, no matter what the cost, had a good deal to do with her ultimate breakdown. With unswerving resolution she had forced herself to obedience, to the performance of her appointed tasks in spite of their distastefulness; and behind the daily work and discipline there had been all the time the ceaseless, aching longing for the man who had loved her and who had gone away.

It was not surprising, therefore, that the tired body and nerves at last gave way, and in the delirium of brain fever Magda revealed the whole pitiful story of the mistakes and misunderstandings which had brought her in desperation to the Sisters of Penitence.

Fortunately it was upon Sister Bernardine that the major part of the nursing devolved, and it was into her gentle ears that Magda unwittingly poured out the history of the past. Bit by bit, from the ramblings of delirium, Sister Bernardine pieced together the story, and her shy, virginal heart found itself throbbing in overflowing sympathy—a sympathy that sought expression in the tender care she gave her patient.

During the long, slow days of convalescence Magda, very helpless and dependent, had gradually learned to love the soft-footed little Sister who came and went throughout her illness—to love her as she would not, at one time, have believed it possible she could grow to love anyone behind the high grey walls which encircled the sisterhood.

If the past year had taught her nothing else, it had at least taught her that goodness and badness are very evenly distributed. She had found both good and bad behind those tall grey walls just as she had found them in the great free world outside.

Her last memory, as her first, was of Sister Bernardine's kind eyes.

"Some of us find happiness in the world," the little Sister had said at parting, "and some of us out of it. I think you were meant to find yours in the world."

It was Magda's own choice to leave the sisterhood on foot. She had nothing to take with her in the way of luggage, and she smiled a little as she realised that, for the moment, she possessed actually nothing but the clothes she stood up in—the same in which she had quitted Friars' Holm a year ago, and which, on departure, she had substituted for the grey veil and habit she was discarding.

At first, as she made her way along the street, she found the continuous ebb and flow of the crowded thoroughfare somewhat confusing after the absolute calm and quiet of the preceding months, but very soon the Londoner's familiar love of London and of its ceaseless, kaleidoscopic movement returned to her, and with it the requisite poise to thread her way through the throngs that trod the pavements.

Then her eyes turned to the shop windows—Catherine's stern discipline had completely failed to stamp out the eternal feminine in her niece—and as they absorbed the silken stuffs and rainbow colours that gleamed and glowed behind the thick plateglass, she became suddenly conscious of her own attire—of its cut and style. When last she had worn it, it had been the final word in fashionable raiment. Now it was out of date. The Wielitzska, whose clothes the newspapers had loved to chronicle, in a frock in which any one of the "young ladies" behind the counters of these self-same shops into which she was gazing would have declined to appear! She almost laughed out loud. And then, quick on the heels of her desire to laugh, came a revulsion of feeling. This little incident, just the disparity between the fashion of her own clothes and the fashion prevailing at the moment, served to make her realise, with a curious clarity of vision, the irrevocable passage of time. A year—a slice out of her life! What other differences would it ultimately show?

Something else was already making itself apparent—the fact that none of the passers-by seemed to recognise her. In the old days, when she had been dancing constantly at the Imperial Theatre, she had grown so used to seeing the sudden look of interest and recognition spring into the eyes of one or another, to the little eager gesture that nudged a companion, pointing out the famous dancer as she passed along the street, that she had thought nothing of it—had hardly consciously noticed it. Now she missed it—missed it extraordinarily.

A sudden sense of intense loneliness swept over her—the loneliness of the man who has been cast on a desert island, only returning to his fellows after many weary months of absence. She felt she could not endure to waste another moment before she saw again the beloved faces of Gillian and Virginie and felt once more the threads of the old familiar life quiver and vibrate between her fingers.

With a quick, imperative gesture she hailed a taxi and was whirled away towards Hampstead.



The first excited greetings and embraces were over. The flurry of broken, scattered phrases, half-tearfully, half-smilingly welcoming her back, had spent themselves, and now old Virginie, drawing away, regarded her with bewildered, almost frightened eyes.

"Mais, mon dieu!" she muttered. "Mon dieu!" Then with a sudden cry: "Cherie! Cherie! What have they done to thee? What have they done?"

"Done to me?" repeated Magda in puzzled tones. "Oh, I see! I'm thinner. I've been ill, you know."

"It is not—that! Hast thou looked in the glass? Oh, my poor——" And the old Frenchwoman incontinently began to weep.

A glass! Magda had not seen her own reflection in a looking-glass since the day she left Friars' Holm. There were no mirrors hanging on the walls of the house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt. Filled with a nameless, inexplicable terror, she turned and walked out of the room. There was an old Chippendale mirror hanging at the further end, but she avoided it. Something in the askance expression of Virginie's eyes had frightened her so that she dared not challenge what the mirror might give back until she was alone.

Once outside the door she flew upstairs to her own room and, locking the door, went to the glass. A stifled exclamation of dismay escaped her. She had not dreamed a year could compass such an alteration! Then, very deliberately, she removed her hat and, standing where the light fell full upon her, she examined her reflection. After a long moment she spoke, whisperingly, beneath her breath.

"Why—why—it isn't me, at all. I'm ugly. Ugly——"

With a quick movement she lifted her arm, screening her face against it for a moment.

Her startled eyes had exaggerated the change absurdly. Nevertheless, that a change had taken place was palpable. The arresting radiance, the vivid physical perfection of her, had gone. She was thin, and with the thinness had come lines—lines of fatigue, and other, more lasting lines born of endurance and self-control. The pliant symmetry of her figure, too, was marred. She stooped a little; the gay, free carriage of her shoulders was gone. The heavy manual work at the sisterhood, of which, in common with the others, she had done her share, had taken its toll of her suppleness and grace, and the hands she extended in front of her, regarding them distastefully, were roughened and worn by the unwonted usage to which they had been subjected. Her hair, so long, hidden from the light and air by the veil she had worn, was flaccid and lustreless. Only her eyes remained unchangedly beautiful. Splendid and miserable, they stared back at the reflection which the mirror yielded.



It was a long time before Magda reappeared downstairs, so long, indeed, that Gillian was beginning to grow nervously uneasy. When at last she came, she was curiously quiet and responded to all Gillian's attempts at conversation with a dull, flat indifference that was strangely at variance with the spontaneously happy excitement which had attended the first few moments after her arrival.

Gillian was acutely conscious of the difference in her manner, but even she, with all her intuition, failed to attribute it to its rightful cause. To her, Magda was so indubitably, essentially the Magda she loved that she was hardly sensible of that shadowing of her radiant beauty which had revealed itself with a merciless clarity to the dancer herself. And such change as she observed she ascribed to recent illness.

Meanwhile Magda got through that first evening at Friars' Holm as best she might. The hours seemed interminable. She was aching for night to come, so that she might be alone with her thoughts—alone to realise and face this new thing which had befallen her.

She had lost her beauty! The one precious gift she had to give Michael, that lover of all beauty! . . . The knowledge seemed to beat against her brain, throbbing and pulsing like a wound, while she made a pretence at doing justice to the little dinner party, which had been especially concocted for her under Virginie's watchful eye, and responded in some sort to Coppertop's periodic outbreaks of jubilation over her return.

But the moment of release came at length. A final good-night kiss to Gillian on the landing outside her bedroom door, and then a nerve-racking hour while Virginie fussed over her, undressing her and preparing her for bed with the same tender care she had devoted to the bebe she had nursed and tended more than twenty years ago.

It was over at last.

"Sleep well!" And Virginie switched off the electric light as she pattered out of the room, leaving Magda alone in the cool dark, with the silken softness of crepe de chine once more caressing her slender limbs, and the fineness of lavender-scented linen smooth against her cheek.

The ease, and comfort, and wellbeing of it all! Yet this first night, passed in the familiar luxury which had lapped her round since childhood, was a harder, more bitter night than any of the preceding three hundred and sixty-five she had spent tossing weary, aching limbs on a lumpy straw mattress with a coarse brown woollen blanket drawn up beneath her chin, vexing her satin skin.

For each of those nights had counted as a step onwards along the hard road that was to lead her back eventually to Michael. Now she knew that they had all been endured in vain. Spiritually her self-elected year of discipline might have fitted her to be the wife of "Saint Michel." But the undimmed physical beauty and charm which Michael, the man and artist, would crave in the woman he loved was gone.

The recognition of these things rushed over her, overwhelming her with a sense of blank and utter failure. It meant the end of everything. As far as she was concerned, life henceforward held nothing more. There was nothing to hope for in the future—except to hope that Michael might never see her again! At least, she would like to feel that his memory of her—of the Wielitzska whose lithe grace and beauty had swept him headlong even against the tide of his convictions—would remain for ever unmarred.

It was a rather touching human little weakness—the weakness and prayer of many a woman who has lost her lover. . . . Let him remember her—always—as she was before the radiance of youth faded, before grief or pain blurred the perfection that had been hers!

Perhaps for Magda the wish was even stronger, more insistent by reason of the fact that her beauty had been of so fine and rare a quality, setting her in a way apart from other women.

With the instinct of the wounded wild creature she longed to hide—to hide herself from Michael, so that she might never see in his eyes that look of quickly veiled disappointment which she knew would spring into them as he realised the change in her. She felt she could not bear that. It would be like a sword-thrust through her heart. . . . Better if she had never left the sisterhood!

Suddenly every nerve of her tautened. Supposing—supposing she returned there, never to emerge again? No chance encounter could ever then bring her within sight or sound of Michael. She would be spared watching the old, eager look of admiration fade suddenly from the grey eyes she loved.

Hour after hour she lay there, dry-eyed, staring into the darkness. And with the dawn her decision was taken.



CHAPTER XXX

AN UNANSWERED LETTER

"You shan't do it!"

When first Magda had bruited her idea of rejoining the sisterhood—the decision which had crystallised out of the long black hours of the night of her return to Friars' Holm—Gillian had merely laughed the notion aside, attaching little importance to it. But now, a week later, when Magda reverted to the subject with a certain purposeful definiteness, she grew suddenly frightened.

"Do you want to throw away every possibility of happiness?" she demanded indignantly. "Just because Michael isn't here, waiting for you on the doorstep, so to speak, you decide to rush off and make it impossible for him ever to see you again!"

Magda kept her head bent, refusing to meet the other's eyes.

"I don't want him to see me now," she said shrinkingly. "I'm not—not the Magda he knew any longer."

"That's an absurd exaggeration. You're not looking very well, that's all," retorted Gillian with her usual practical common sense. "You can't suppose that would make any difference to Michael! It didn't make any to me. I'm only too glad to have you back at any price!"

Magda's faint responsive smile was touched with that bitter knowledge which is the heritage of the woman who has been much loved for her beauty.

"You're a woman, Gillyflower," she said. "And Michael is not only a man—but an artist. Men don't want you when the bloom has been brushed off. And you know how Michael worships beauty! He's bound to—being an artist."

"I think you're morbidly self-conscious," declared Gillian firmly. "I suppose it's the result of being out of the world for so long. You've lost all sense of proportion. You're quite lovely enough, now, to satisfy most people. You only look rather tired and worn out."

But Magda's face remained clouded.

"But even that isn't—all," she answered. "It's—oh, it's a heap of things! Somehow I thought when I came back I should see the road clear. But it isn't. It's all shadowed—just as it was before. I thought I should have so much to give Michael now. And I haven't anything. I don't think I ever quite realised before that, however much you try to atone, you can never undo the harm you've done. But I've had time to think things out while I was with the Sisters."

"And if you go back to them you'll have time to do nothing but think for the rest of your life!" flashed back Gillian.

"Oh, no!" Magda spoke quickly. "I shouldn't return under a vow of penitence. There are working sisters attached to the community who go about amongst the sick and poor in the slums. I should join as a working sister if I went back."

Gillian stared at her in amazement. Magda devoting her life to good works seemed altogether out of the picture! She began to feel that the whole affair was getting too complicated for her to handle, and as usual, when in a difficulty, she put the matter up to Lady Arabella.

The latter, with her accumulated wisdom of seventy years, saw more clearly than the younger woman, although even she hardly understood that sense of the deadly emptiness and failure of her life which had overwhelmed Magda since her return to Friars' Holm. But the old woman realised that she had passed through a long period of strain, and that, now the reaction had come, the Vallincourt blood in her might drive her into almost any extreme of conduct.

"If only Michael were on the spot!" she burst out irritably. "I own I'm disappointed in the man! I was so sure six months would bring him to his senses."

"I know," assented Gillian miserably. "It's—it's—the most hopeless state of things imaginable!"

Lady Arabella's interview with Magda herself proved unproductive.

"Have you written to Michael?" she demanded.

"Written to him?" A flash of the old defiant spirit sounded in Magda's voice. "No, nor shall I."

"Don't be a fool, child. He's probably learned something during this last twelve months—as well as you. Don't let pride get in your way now."

"It's not pride. Marraine, I never knew—I never thought——Look at me! What have I to give Michael now? Have you forgotten that he's an artist and that beauty means everything to him?"

"Well?"

"'Well!'" Magda held out her hands. "Can't you see that I'm changed? . . . Michael wouldn't want me to pose for him as Circe now!"

"He wanted you for a wife—not a model, my dear. You can buy models at so much the hour."

"Oh, Marraine! You won't understand——"

Lady Arabella took the slender, work-roughened hands in hers.

"Perhaps I understand better than you think," she said quietly. "There are other ways of assessing life than merely in terms of beauty. And you can believe this, too: you've lost nothing from the point of view of looks that a few months of normal healthy life won't set right. Moreover, if you'd grown as plain as a pikestaff, I don't think Michael would care twopence! He's an artist, I know. He can't help that, but he's a man first. And he's a man who knows how to love. Promise me one thing," she went on insistently. "Promise that you'll do nothing definite—yet. Not, at least, without consulting me."

Magda hesitated.

"Very well. I'll do nothing without—telling you—first."

That was the utmost concession she would make, and with that her godmother had to be content.

The same evening a letter in Lady Arabella's spirited, angular handwriting sped on its way to Paris.

"If you're not absolutely determined to ruin both your own and Magda's lives, my dear Michael, put your pride and your ridiculous principles in your pocket and come back to England. I don't happen to be a grandmother, but I'm quite old enough for the job, so you might pay my advice due respect by taking it."



"I thought I was shelved altogether."

Thus Dan Storran, rather crossly, when, a day or two later, he met Gillian by appointment for lunch at their favourite little restaurant in Soho. It was the first time she had been able to fix up a meeting with him since Magda's return, as naturally his customary visits to Friars' Holm were out of the question now.

"Well, you expected my time to be pretty well occupied the first week or two after Magda came back, didn't you?" countered Gillian.

She smiled as she spoke and proceeded leisurely to draw off her gloves, while Storran signalled to a waiter.

She was really very glad to see him again. There was something so solid and dependable about him, and she felt it would be very comforting to confide in him her anxieties concerning Magda. Not that she anticipated he would have any particular compassion to bestow upon the latter. But she was femininely aware that inasmuch as Magda's affairs were disturbing her peace of mind, he would listen to them with sympathetic attention and probably, out of the depths of his man's consciousness, produce some quite sound and serviceable advice.

Being a wise woman, however, she did not launch out into immediate explanation, but waited for him to work off his own individual grumble at not having seen her recently, trusting to the perfectly cooked little lunch to exercise a tranquillising effect.

It was not until they had reached the cigarette and coffee stage of the proceedings that she allowed a small, well-considered sigh to escape her and drift away into the silence that had fallen between them. Storran glanced across at her with suddenly observant eyes.

"What is it?" he asked quickly. "You look worried. Are you?"

She nodded silently.

"And here I've been grousing away about my own affairs all the time! Why didn't you stop me?"

"You know I'm interested in your affairs."

"And I'm interested in yours. What's bothering you, Gillian? Tell me."

"Magda," said Gillian simply.

She was rather surprised to observe that Dan's face did not, as usual, darken at the mere mention of Magda's name.

"I saw her the other day," he said quickly. "I was in the Park and she drove by."

Gillian felt that there was something more to come. She waited in silence.

"She has altered very much," he went on bluntly. Then, after a moment: "I felt—sorry for her."

"You did, Dan?" Gillian's face lit up. "I'm glad. I've always hated your being so down on her."

With an abrupt movement he jabbed the glowing stub of his cigarette on to an ash-tray, pressing it down until it went out. Then, taking out his case, he lit another before replying.

"I shan't be 'down on her' any more," he said at last. "I never guessed she'd felt things—like that."

"No. No one did. I don't suppose even Magda herself knew she could ever go through all she has done just for an ideal."

Then very quietly, very simply and touchingly, she told him the story of all that had happened, of Magda's final intention of becoming a working member of the sisterhood, and of Lady Arabella's letter summoning Michael back to England.

"But even when he comes," added Gillian, "unless he is very careful—unless he loves her in the biggest way a man can love, so that nothing else matters, he'll lose her. He'll have to convince her that she means just that to him."

Storran was silent for a long time, and when at last he spoke it was with an obvious effort.

"Listen," he said. "There's something you don't know. Perhaps when I've told you, you won't have anything more to say to me—I don't know."

Gillian opened her lips in quick disclaimer, but he motioned her to be silent.

"Wait," he said. "Wait till you've heard what I have to say. You think, and Magda thinks, that June died of a broken heart—at least, that the shock of all that miserable business down at Stockleigh helped to kill her."

"Yes." Gillian assented mechanically when he paused.

"I thought so, too, once. It was what June's sister told me—told everyone. But it wasn't true. She believed it, I know—probably believes it to this day. But, thank God, it wasn't true!"

"How can you tell? All that strain and heart-break just at a time when she wasn't strong. Oh, Dan! We can never be sure—sure!"

"I am sure. Quite sure," he said steadily. "When I came to my senses out there in 'Frisco, I couldn't rest under that letter from June's sister. It burned into me like a red-hot iron. I was half-mad with pain, I think. I wrote to the doctor who had attended her, but I got no answer. Then I sailed for England, determined to find and see the man for myself. I found him—my letter had miscarried somehow—and he told me that June could not have lived. There were certain complications in her case which made it impossible. In fact, if she had been so happy that she had longed to live—and tried to—it would only have made it harder for her, a rougher journey to travel. As it was, she went easily, without fighting death—letting go, without any effort, her hold on life."

He ceased, and after a moment's silence Gillian spoke in strained, horror-stricken tones.

"And you never told us! Oh! It was cruel of you, Dan! You would have spared Magda an infinity of self-reproach!"

"I didn't want to spare her. I left her in ignorance on purpose. I wanted her to be punished—to suffer as she had made me suffer."

There were tears in Gillian's eyes. It was terrible to her that Dan could be so bitter—so vengefully cruel. Yet she recognised that it had been but the natural outcome of the man's primitive nature to pay back good for good and evil for evil.

"Then why do you tell me now?" she asked at last.

"Why—because you've beaten me—you with your sweetness and courage and tolerance. You've taught me that retribution and punishment are best left in—more merciful Hands than ours."

Gillian's hand went out to meet his.

"Oh, Dan, I'm so glad!" she said simply.

He kept her hand in his a moment, then released it gently.

"Well, you can tell her now," he said awkwardly.

"I?" Gillian smiled a little. "No. I want you to tell her. Don't you see, Dan"—as she sensed his impulse to refuse—"it will make all the difference in Magda if you and she are—are square with each other? She's overweighted. She's been carrying a bigger burden than she can bear. Michael comes first, of course, but there's been her treatment of you, as well. June, too. And—and other things. And it's crushing her. . . . No, you must tell her."

"I will—if you say I must. But she won't forgive me easily."

"I think she will. I think she'll understand just what made you do it. So now we'll go back to Friars' Holm together."

An hour later Storran came slowly downstairs from the little room where he and Magda had met again for the first time since that moonlight night at Stockleigh—met, not as lovers, but as a man and woman who have each sinned and each learned, out of their sinning, how to pardon and forgive.

Storran was very quiet and grave when presently he found himself alone with Gillian.

"We men will never understand women," he said. "There's an angel hidden away somewhere in every one of you." His mouth curved into a smile, half-sad, half-whimsical. "I've just found Magda's."



Lady Arabella and Gillian, both feeling rather like conspirators, waited anxiously for a reply to the former's letter to Quarrington. But none came. The time slipped by until a fortnight had elapsed, and with the passage of each day their hearts sank lower.

Neither of them believed that Michael would have utterly disregarded the letter, had he received it, but they feared that it might have miscarried, or that he might be travelling and so not receive it in time to prevent Magda's carrying out her avowed intention of becoming a working member of the sisterhood.

Even though she knew now that at least June Storran's death need no longer be added to her account, she still adhered to her decision. As she had told Dan with a weary simplicity: "I'm glad. But it won't make any difference—to Michael and me. Too much water has run under the bridge. Love that is dead doesn't come to life again."

Each day was hardening her resolve, and both Lady Arabella and Gillian—those two whose unselfish happiness was bound up in her own—were beginning to realise that it would be a race against time if she was to be saved from taking a step that would divide her from Michael as long as they both should live.

At the end of a fortnight Gillian, driven to desperation, despatched a telegram to his Paris address: "Did you receive communication from Lady Arabella?" But it shared the fate of the letter, failing to elicit any reply. She allowed sufficient time to elapse to cover any ordinary delay in transit, then, unknown to Magda, taxied down to the house in Park Lane.

"I want you to invite Magda to stay with you, please," she informed Lady Arabella abruptly.

"Of course I will," she replied. "But why? You've got a reason."

Gillian nodded.

"Yes," she acknowledged quietly. "I'm going to Paris—to find Michael."

Lady Arabella, whose high spirits had wilted a little in the face of the double disappointment regarding any answer from Quarrington, beamed satisfaction.

"You blessed child!" she exclaimed. "I'd have gone myself, but my old body is so stiff with rheumatism that I don't believe they'd get me on board the boat except in an ambulance!"

"Well, I'm going," said Gillian. "Only the point is, Magda mustn't know. If she thought I was going off in pursuit of Michael I believe she'd lock me up in the cellar. She intends never to let him see her again. Melrose will manage about the letters, and somehow you've got to prevent Magda from coming to Friars' Holm and finding out that I'm not there."

"I'll take her away with me," declared Lady Arabella. "Rheumatism—Harrogate. It's quite simple."

Gillian heaved a sigh of relief.

"Yes. That would be a good plan," she agreed. "Then I'd let you know when we should arrive—"

"'We?'"

"Michael and I. I'm not coming back without him. And you could bring Magda straight back to town with you."

Lady Arabella's keen old eyes searched her face.

"You sound very certain of success. Supposing you find Michael still unforgiving—and he refuses to return with you?"

"I believe in Michael," replied Gillian steadily. "He's made mistakes. People in love do. But when he knows all that Magda has endured—for his sake, really—why, he'll come back. I'm sure of it."

"I don't know, my dear. I was sure he would come back within six months. But, you see, I was wrong. Men are kittle cattle—and often very slow to arrive at the intrinsic value and significance of things. A woman jumps to it while a man is crawling round on his hands and knees in the dark, looking for it with a match."

Gillian laughed and got up to go, and Lady Arabella—whose rheumatism was quite real at the moment—rose rather painfully and hobbled down the room beside her, her thin, delicate old hand resting on the silver knob of a tall, ebony walking-stick.

"Now, remember," urged Gillian. "Magda mustn't have the least suspicion Michael may be coming back—or she'd be off into her slums before you could stop her. Whatever happens, you've got to prevent her rushing back to the Sisters of Penitence."

"Only over my dead body, my dear," Lady Arabella assured her determinedly. "She shan't go any other way."

So Gillian returned to Friars' Holm bearing with her a note from Lady Arabella in which she asked her god-daughter to pay her a visit. In it, however, the wily old lady made no mention of her further idea of going to Harrogate, lest it should militate against an acceptance of the invitation. Magda demurred a little at first, but Gillian, suddenly endowed with diplomacy worthy of a Machiavelli, pointed out that if she really had any intention of ultimately withdrawing into a community the least she could do was to give her godmother the happiness of spending a few days with her.

"She will only urge me to give up the idea all the time," protested Magda. "And I've quite made up my mind. The sooner I can get away from—from everything"—looking round her with desperate, haunted eyes—"the better it will be."

Gillian's impulse to combat her decision to rejoin the sisterhood died on her lips stillborn. It was useless to argue the matter. There was only one person in the world who could save Magda from herself, and that was Michael. The main point was to concentrate on getting him back to England, rather than waste her energies upon what she knew beforehand must prove a fruitless argument.

"I'll go to Marraine for a couple of nights, anyway," said Magda at last. "After that, I want to make arrangements for my reception into the sisterhood."

Gillian returned no answer. She felt her heart contract at the quiet decision in Magda's voice, but she pinned her faith on Lady Arabella's ability to hold her, somehow, till she herself had accomplished her errand to Paris.



CHAPTER XXXI

AGAINST TIME

Gillian, dashing headlong into Victoria Station, encountered Storran sauntering leisurely out of it, a newspaper under his arm.

"Where are you off to?" he demanded, stopping abruptly. "You look as if you were in a hurry."

"I am. Don't stop me. I'm catching the boat-train."

Storran pulled out his watch as he turned and fell into step beside her.

"Then you've got a good half-hour to spare. No hurry," he returned placidly.

Gillian glanced at the watch on her wrist.

"Are you sure?" she asked doubtfully. "If so, my watch must be altogether wrong!"

"Unbeliever! Come and look at the clock. And, incidentally, give me that suit-case."

She yielded up the case obediently and, having verified the time, proceeded towards the platform at a more reasonable gait.

Storran, his long legs leisurely keeping pace with her shorter ones, smiled down at her.

"And now, for the second time of asking, where are you off to?"

"I'm going to France—to fetch Michael."

He gave a quick exclamation—whether of surprise or disapproval she was not quite sure.

"You haven't heard from him, then?"

"No. And unless something happens quick, it will be too late."

"But if he were at his studio he would surely have answered Lady Arabella's letter."

"Yes, I suppose so," replied Gillian absently, her eyes following the queue of passengers passing through the gate on the platform. By mutual consent they had come to a standstill outside it.

"Then if he isn't there, what's the use of your rushing over to Paris?" protested Storran. "It's absurd—an absolute wild-goose chase. You can't go!"

Gillian's brown eyes came back to his face.

"But I'm going," she said calmly.

He frowned.

"If Michael's not at his studio he may be—anywhere!"

She nodded.

"I know. If so, I shall follow—anywhere."

Storran looked down at her and read the quiet determination in her face.

"Then let me come too," he said. "Sort of courier, you know. I'd just be at hand in case of a tangle."

"Oh, no! I couldn't let you. There's not the least need. Good heavens, I'm not a baby!"

There was a curious softness in Dan's blue eyes as they rested on her.

"No. I think you're—a very good friend," he said. "But I don't see why you should have the monopoly! Let me show I know how to be a good pal, too, if I want to."

"No—no." Gillian still protested, but her tone betrayed signs of weakening.

"We'll be as conventional as you like," urged Dan, twinkling. "I'd stop at different hotels."

"Well, but—"

"Say 'yes'!" he insisted.

Gillian smiled.

"You obstinate person! Yes, then!"

"Thank you. Then I'll go along and buy a ticket."

He turned and went towards the booking-office, while Gillian, inwardly much relieved, awaited his return. She could not but acknowledge that in the "wild-goose chase" upon which she was embarking it would be an enormous comfort to have Storran at hand in case of an emergency. As to the proprieties—well, Gillian was far too honest and independent a soul to worry about them in the circumstances. Her friend's happiness was at stake. And whether people chose to talk because she and Dan Storran travelled to Paris together—or to Timbuctoo, for the matter of that, if Michael had chanced to depart thither—troubled her not at all.

When Storran rejoined her a much more practical consideration presented itself to her mind.

"But, my dear man, you can't fly with me to Paris without even a tooth-brush! I'd forgotten you'd no luggage!"

Her face fell as she spoke. But Storran dismissed the matter with a smile.

"Oh, I can buy clean collars and shirts as I go along," he replied, entirely unruffled. "The dickens was to get on to the train at all! They assured me there wasn't a seat. However, I make a point of never believing official statements—on principle."

And as a consequence of such well-directed incredulity, Storran accompanied Gillian to Dover and thence to Calais.

They had a good crossing—sun up and blue sky. Looking back, afterwards, it always seemed to Gillian as though the short time it occupied had been a merciful breathing space—a tranquil interval, specially vouchsafed, in which she was able to brace herself for the coming race against time. Just so long as they were on board, nothing she could do was of any importance whatever, either to help or hinder the fulfilment of her errand. She could not quicken the speed of the boat by a single throb of its engine. So, like a sensible woman, she sat on deck with Dan and enjoyed herself amazingly.

Afterwards, in quick succession, came the stir and bustle of landing and the journey to Paris. They arrived too late to make any inquiries that night, but ten o'clock the following morning found them outside the building where Michael had his apartment.

"Oh, Dan!"—Gillian was seized with sudden panic. "Supposing he is here, after all, and has deliberately not answered Lady Arabella's letter?"

"I shouldn't suppose anything so foolish. Michael may be many kinds of a fool—artists very often are, I believe. It's part of the temperament. But whatever he proposed to do regarding Magda, there's no reason in the world to suppose he wouldn't answer Lady Arabella's letter."

"No—no. Perhaps not," agreed Gillian hurriedly. But it was in rather a shaky voice that she asked to see Mr. Quarrington when finally they found themselves confronted by the concierge.

"Monsieur Quarrington?" Hands, shoulders, and eyebrows all seemed to gesticulate at once as madame la concierge made answer. "But he has been gone from here two—no, three months. Perhaps madame did not know?"

"No," said Gillian. "I didn't know. But I thought he might possibly be away, because I—I have had no answer to a letter I wrote him."

"What misfortune!"

The concierge regarded Gillian with a pair of shrewd, gimlet eyes while a stream of inquiry and comment issued from her lips. Madame was the sister of monsieur, perhaps? Truly, they resembled each other! One could see at a glance. No, not a sister? Ah, a friend, then? And there had been no answer to a letter! But monsieur had left an address. Oh, yes. And all letters were forwarded. She herself saw to that.

At last Gillian managed to stem the torrent of garrulity and interposed a question concerning the telegram she had sent.

A telegram! Now that was another affair altogether. Yes, the concierge remembered the telegram. She had opened it to see if it were of life or death importance, in which case she would have, of course, telegraphed its contents to monsieur at his present address.

Gillian was nearly crying with impatience as the woman's voluble tongue ran on complacently.

"Then you did send it on?" she managed to interpolate at last.

The letter—yes. Not, of course, the telegram. That would have been a needless expense seeing that monsieur would already have had the letter, since all the letters were sent on. All! She, Madame Ribot, could vouch for that.

At the end of half an hour Gillian succeeded in extracting Michael's address from amid the plethora of words and, bidding the voluble concierge bon jour, she and Storran beat a masterly retreat.

It appeared that Michael had been commissioned to paint the portrait of some Italian society beauty and had gone to Rome. Gillian screwed up her small face resolutely.

"I shall go to Rome!" she announced succinctly. There was a definite defiance in her tone, and Storran concealed a smile.

"Of course you will," he replied composedly. "Just as well I came with you, isn't it?" he added with great cheerfulness.

Her expression relaxed.

"You really are rather a nice person, Dan," she allowed graciously. "I was horribly afraid you'd suggest wiring Michael again, or something silly like that. I'm not going to trust to anything of that kind."

Accordingly, the only wire despatched was one to Lady Arabella, informing her as to their movements, and a few hours later found Dan and Gillian rushing across Europe as fast as the thunderous whirl of the express could take them. They travelled day and night, and it was a very weary Gillian who at last opened her eyes to the golden sunshine of Italy.

At the hotel whither Madame Ribot had directed them, fresh disappointment awaited them. The manager—when he found that the two dusty and somewhat dishevelled-looking travellers who presented themselves at the inquiry bureau were actually friends of Signor Quarrington, the famous English artist who had stayed at his hotel—was desolated, but the signor had departed a month ago! Had he the address? But assuredly. He would write it down for the signora.

"He's in Normandy!" exclaimed Gillian in tones of bitter disappointment. "At—what's the name of the place?—Armanches. Oh, Dan! We've got to go right back to Paris again and then on to the coast."

Her face was full of anxiety. This would mean at least a delay of several days before they could possibly see Michael, and meanwhile it was a moot question as to how much longer Lady Arabella could restrain Magda from taking definite steps with regard to joining the sisterhood.

Storran nodded.

"Yes," he said quietly. "But all the same, you'll not start back till to-morrow—"

"Oh, but I must!" interrupted Gillian. "We can't afford to waste a moment."

He glanced down at her and shook his head. Her face was white and drawn, and there were deep violet shadows underneath her eyes. Suspense and her anxious impatience had told upon her, and she had slept but little on the journey. And now, with the addition of this last, totally unexpected disappointment, she looked as though she could not stand much more.

"We can afford to waste a single day better than we can afford the three or four which it would cost us if you collapsed en route," said Storran.

"I shan't collapse," she protested with white lips.

"So much the better. But all the same, you'll stay here till to-morrow and get a good night's rest."

"I shouldn't sleep," she urged. "Let's go right on, Dan. Let's go——"

But the sentence was never finished. Quite suddenly she swayed, stretching out her hands with a blind, groping movement. Dan was just in time to catch her in his arms as she toppled over in a dead faint.

It was a week later when, in the early morning, a rather wan and white-faced Gillian sprang up from her seat as the train ran into Bayeux.

"Thank goodness we're here at last!" she exclaimed.

Storran put out his hand to steady her as the train jolted to a standstill.

"Yes, we're here at last," he said. "Now to find a vehicle of some description to take us out to Armanches."

As he had suggested it would, Gillian's collapse had delayed them some time. Probably she had caught a slight chill while travelling, and that, together with the fatigue from which she was suffering, combined to keep her in bed at the hotel in Rome for a couple of days.

When the slight feverishness had abated, she slept the greater part of the time, her weary body exacting the price for all those wakeful hours she had passed on the train. But it was not until four days had elapsed that Dan would agree to a resumption of the journey. Even then, consent was only wrung from him by the fear that she would fret herself ill over any further delay. He did not consider her by any means fit to travel. But Gillian was game to the core, and they had reached Bayeux without further contretemps.

"The thing that puzzles me," she said as they started on the long drive from Bayeux to Armanches, "is why Michael didn't send his Normandy address to Madame Ribot. We should have been saved all that long journey to Rome if he had."

"Perhaps he intended to, and forgot," suggested Dan. "Artists are proverbially absent-minded."

But Gillian shook her head with a dissatisfied air. Michael was not of the absent-minded type.

Armanches was a tiny place on the Normandy coast, in reality not much more than a fishing village, but its possession of a beautiful plage—smooth, fine, golden sands—brought many visitors to the old-fashioned hostelry it boasted.

The landlady, a smiling, rosy-cheeked woman, with a chubby little brown-faced son hiding shy embarrassment behind her ample skirts, greeted the travellers hospitably. But when they mentioned Quarrington's name a look of sympathetic concern overspread her comely face.

Yes, he was there. And of course madame could not know, but he had been ill, seriously ill with la grippe—taken ill the very day he had arrived, nearly a month ago. He had a nurse. Oh, yes! One had come from Bayeux. But this influenza! It was a veritable scourge. One was here to-day and gone to-morrow. However, Michael Quarrington was recovering, the saints be praised! Monsieur and madame wished to see him? The good woman looked doubtful. She would inquire. What name? Grey? But there was a telegram awaiting madame!

Gillian's face blanched as the landlady bustled away in search of the wire. Had Magda already——Oh, but that was impossible! Lady Arabella was in charge at that end, and Gillian had a great belief in Lady Arabella's capacity to deal with any crisis that might arise. Nevertheless, they had wired her the Normandy address from Rome, in case of necessity. The next moment Gillian had torn open the telegram and she and Dan were reading it together.

"Magda insists we return to London on Wednesday. She has completed preliminary arrangements to join sisterhood and goes there Thursday. Impossible to dissuade her.—ARABELLA WINTER."

Gillian's mouth set itself in a straight line of determination as her eyes raced along the score or so of pregnant words. She was silent a moment. Then she met Storran's questioning glance.

"We can just do it," she said sternly. "To-day is Wednesday. By crossing to Southampton to-night, we can make London to-morrow."

Without waiting for his reply she entered the inn and ran quickly up the stairs which the landlady had already ascended.

"But, madame, I am not sure that monsieur will receive anyone," protested the astonished woman, turning round as Gillian caught up with her.

"I must see him," asserted Gillian quietly.

Perhaps something in the tense young face touched a sympathetic chord in the Frenchwoman's honest heart. She scented romance, and when she emerged from the invalid's bedroom her face was wreathed in smiles.

"It is all arranged. Will madame please to enter?"

A moment later Gillian found herself standing in front of a tall, gaunt figure of a man, whose coat hung loosely from his shoulders and whose face was worn and haggard with something more than la grippe alone.

"Oh, Michael!"

A little, stricken cry broke from her lips. What men and women make each other suffer! She realised it as she met the stark, bitter misery of the grey eyes that burned at her out of the thin face and remembered the look on Magda's own face when she had last seen her.

She went straight to the point without a word of greeting or of explanation. There was no time for explanations, except the only one that mattered.

"Michael, why didn't you answer Lady Arabella's letter?"

He stared at her. Then he passed his hand wearily across his forehead.

"Letter? I don't remember any letter."

"She wrote to you about a month ago. I know the letter was forwarded on to Rome. It must have followed you here."

"A month ago?" he repeated.

Then a light broke over his face. He turned and crossed the room to where a small pile of letters lay on a table, dusty and forgotten.

"Perhaps it's here," he said. "I was taken ill directly I arrived. I never even sent this address to the concierge at Paris. I believe I was off my head part of the time—'flue plays the deuce with you. But I remember now. The nurse told me there were some letters which had come while I was ill. I—didn't bother about them."

While he spoke he was turning over the envelopes, one by one, in a desultory fashion.

"Yes. This is Lady Arabella's writing." He paused and looked across at Gillian.

"Will you read it, please?" she said. "And—oh, you ought to sit down! You don't look very strong yet."

He smiled a little.

"I'm not quite such a crock as I look. But won't you sit down yourself while I read this letter? Is it of importance?"

"Oh! Please read it!" exclaimed Gillian with sudden nervous impatience.

It seemed to her an eternity while he read the letter. But at last he looked up from its perusal.

"Well?" she asked under her breath.

Very deliberately he refolded the sheet of notepaper and slipped it back into its envelope.

"It would have made no difference if I had received it earlier," he said composedly.

"No difference"

"None. Because, you see, this letter—asking me to go back to Magda—is written under a misapprehension.

"How? What do you mean?"

"I mean—that Magda has—no further use for me."

Gillian leaned forward.

"You're wrong," she said tersely—"quite wrong."

"No." He shook his head. "I'm not blaming her. Looking back, I'm not even very much surprised. But still, the fact remains, she has no further use for me."

"Will you tell me what makes you think that?" With an effort Gillian forced herself to speak quietly and composedly.

He was silent a moment, staring out of the window at the gay blue sea beyond, sparkling in the morning sunlight. All at once he swung round on her, his face wrung with a sudden agony.

"I know," he said in a roughened voice. "I know, because I wrote to her—six months ago. I was hard, I know, brutally hard to her that last day at Friars' Holm. But—God! I paid for it afterwards! And I wrote to her—bared my very soul to her. . . . Wrote so that if she had ever cared she must at least have answered me."

He stopped abruptly, his face working.

"And she didn't answer?"

A wry smile twisted his lips.

"I got my own letter back," he said quietly. "After all, that was an answer—a conclusive one."

Gillian was thinking rapidly. Six months ago! A momentary flash of recollection came to her. So Lady Arabella, that wise old citizen of the world, had been quite right after all! She had given Michael six months to find out his imperative need of Magda. And he had found it. Only—something had gone wrong.

"Magda never had that letter," she said quietly at last.

She was gradually beginning to piece together the separate parts of the puzzle. All letters that came for Magda had been forwarded on to the sisterhood, and had she herself readdressed this of Michael's she would have recognised the handwriting. But probably she had been away from home, or had chanced to be out at post time, in which case Melrose, or old Virginie, would have readdressed the envelope and dropped it in the pillar box at the corner of the road.

Then—as was the case with any correspondence addressed to one of the Sisters of Penitence—the letter would be read by the Mother Superior and passed on to its destined recipient if she thought good. If not——

Gillian had learned a great deal about Catherine Vallincourt by now, both from Lady Arabella and from Magda herself, who, before leaving the community, had discovered the identity of its head. And she could visualise the stern, fanatical woman, obsessed by her idea of disciplining Magda and of counteracting the effects of her brother's marriage with Diane Wielitzska, opening the letter and, after perusal, calmly sealing it up in its envelope again and returning it to the sender.

"Magda never had that letter, Michael," she repeated. "Listen!" And then, without preamble, but with every word vibrant with pity for the whole tragedy, she poured out the story of Magda's passionate repentance and atonement, of her impetuous adoption of her father's remorseless theory, mistaken though it might be, that pain is the remedy for sin, and of the utter, hopeless despair which had overwhelmed her now that she believed it had all proved unavailing.

"She has come to believe that you don't want her—never could want her, Michael—because she has failed so much."

There was more than one reproach mingled with the story, but Michael made no protest. It was only when she had finished that Gillian could read in his tortured eyes all that her narrative had cost him.

"Yes," he said at last. "It's true. I wanted the impossible. I was looking for a goddess—not a woman. . . . But now I want—just a woman, Gillian."

"Then, if you want her, you must save her from herself. You've just twenty-four hours to do it in. To-morrow she's still Magda. The next day she'll be Sister Somebody. And you'll have lost her."

Half an hour later, when Michael's nurse returned, she found her patient packing a suit-case with the assistance of a pretty, brown-haired girl whose eyes shone with the unmistakable brightness of recent tears.

"But you're not fit to travel!" she protested in horrified dismay. "You mustn't think of it, Mr. Quarrington."

But Michael only laughed at her, defying her good-humouredly.

"If the man you loved were waiting for you in England, nurse, you know you'd go—and you wouldn't care a hang whether you were fit to travel or not!"

The nurse smiled in spite of herself.

"No," she admitted. "I suppose I shouldn't."

As the Havre-Southampton boat steamed through the moonlit night, Dan and Gillian were pacing the deck together.

"I'm so glad Michael is going back to Magda without knowing—about June," said Gillian, coming to a standstill beside the deck-rail. "Going back just because his love is too big for anything else to matter now."

"Haven't you told him?"—Storran's voice held surprise.

"No. I decided not to. I should like Magda to tell him that herself."

They were both silent for a little while. Gillian bent over the rail, looking down at the phosphorescent water breaking away from the steamer's bow. Suddenly a big hand covered hers.

"I think I'm—lonely," said Storran.

"Gillian," he went on, his voice deepening. "Gillian . . . dear. We're two rather lonely people. We shall be lonelier still when Michael and Magda are married. Couldn't we be lonely—in company?"

Gillian's hand moved a little beneath his, then stayed still.

"Why, Dan—Dan——" she stammered.

"Yes," went on the strong, tender voice. "I'm asking you to marry me, Gillian, I'd never expect too much of you. We both know all that's in the past of each of us. But we might help each other to be less lonely—good comrades together, Gillian."

And suddenly Gillian realised how good it would be to rest once more in the shelter of a man's affection and good comradeship—to have someone to laugh with or to be sorry with. There's a tender magic in the word "together." And she, too, had something to give in return—sympathy, and understanding, and a warm friendship. . . . She would not be going to him empty-handed.

"Is it yes, Gillian?"

She bent her head.

"Yes, Dan."



CHAPTER XXXII

THE EDGE OF THE DAWN

Magda paused outside the closed door of the room. She knew whom she would see within. Lady Arabella had told her he was there waiting for her.

Her first impulse had been to refuse to meet him. Then the temptation to see him again—just once more—before she passed out of his life altogether, rushed over her like the surge of some resistless sea, sweeping everything before it.

Very quietly she opened the door and went into the room.

"Magda!"

She never knew whether he really uttered her name or whether it was only the voiceless, clamorous cry of his whole consciousness—of a man's passionate demand for the woman who is mate of his soul and body.

But she answered its appeal, her innermost being responding to the claim of it. All recollection of self, of the dimming of her beauty, even of the great gulf of months that lay between them, crowded with mistakes and failure, was burned away in the white-hot flame of love that blazed up within her.

She ran to him, and that white, searing flame found its expression in the dear human tenderness of the little cry that broke from her as he turned his gaunt face towards her.

"Oh, Saint Michel! Saint Michel! How dreadfully ill you look! Oh, my dear—sit down! You're not fit to stand!"

But when that first instinctive cry had left her lips, memory came flooding over her once more. She shrank back from him, covering her face with her hands, agonisingly conscious of the change in herself—of that shadowing of her beauty which the sensitiveness of a woman in love had so piteously magnified.

Then, drawing her hands slowly down, she braced herself to say what must be said.

"You are free of me, Michael." She spoke in a curious, still voice. "I know Marraine and Gillian between them have brought you back. But you are free of me. As you see—I shall never do any more harm. No other man will come to grief for the sake of the Wielitzska. . . . I determined that as I had made others pay, so I would pay. I think"—suddenly moving towards the window and standing full in the brilliant sunlight—"I think you'll agree I've settled the bill."

Michael came to her side.

"I want you for my wife," he said simply.

She held out her work-roughened hands, while the keen-edged sunlight pitilessly revealed the hollowed line of cheek and throat, the lustreless dark hair, the fine lines that Pain, the great Sculptor, had graved about her mouth.

"You are an artist before everything, Michael," she said. "Look—look well!"

He took the two work-worn hands in his and drew her nearer him.

"I'm your lover before everything," he answered. "When will you come to me, Magda?"

"No, no," she said whisperingly. "I mustn't come. You'll never—never quite forgive me. Some day the past would come between us again—you'll never forget it all."

"No," he replied steadily. "Perhaps not. Consequences cannot be evaded. There are things that can't be forgotten. But one forgives. And I love you—love you, Magda, so that I can't face life without you." His voice vibrated. "The past must always lie like a shadow on our love. But you're my woman—my soul! And if you've sinned, then it must be my sin, too——"

She leaned away from him.

"Do you mean—June?" she asked.

He nodded with set lips.

"Then—then you don't know—you haven't heard?"

His expression answered her and her face changed—grew suddenly radiant, transfigured. "Oh, Saint Michel—Saint Michel! Then there is one thing I can do, one gift I have still left to give! Oh, my dear, I can take away the shadow!" Her voice breathless and shaken, she told him how June had died—all that Dan Storran had learned from the doctor who had attended her.

"I know I hurt her—hurt her without thinking. But oh, Michael! Thank God, it wasn't through me that she died!"

And Michael, as he folded his arms about her, knew that the shadow which had lain between him and the woman he loved was there no longer. They were free—freed from those "ropes of steel" which had held them bound. Free to go together and find once more their Garden of Eden.

Presently, when those first perfect moments of reunion were past, Magda gave utterance to the doubts and perplexities that still vexed her soul.

"Pain may purify," she said slowly. "But it spoils, Michael, and blots, and ruins. I think, after all, pain is meaningless."

Michael's grey, steady eyes met her troubled ones.

"I don't think pain—just as pain—purifies," he answered quickly. "Pain is merely horrible. It is the willingness to suffer that shrives us—not the pain itself."

Later still, the essential woman in her came into its own again. "I shall never be able to sit for you any more, Saint Michel," she said regretfully. "I'm nobody's model—now!"

She could see only her lost beauty—the unthinking, radiant beauty of mere youth. But Michael could see all that her voluntary renunciation and atonement had bestowed in its stead of more enduring significance.

He took her by the hand and led her to the mirror.

"There," he said, a great content in his voice, "is the model for the greatest picture I shall ever paint—the model for my 'Madonna.'"

THE END