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.