Lady Arabella, as might have been anticipated, concealed
her own sore-heartedness under a manner that was rather
more militant than usual, if that were possible.
“Why you hadn’t more sense than to spend
your time fooling with a sort of cave-man from the
backwoods, I can’t conceive,” she scolded.
“You must have known how it would end.”
“I didn’t. I never thought about
it. I was just sick with Michael because he had
gone abroad, and then, when I heard that he was married,
it was the last straw. I don’t think—that
night—I should have much cared what happened.”
Lady Arabella nodded.
“Women like you make it heaven or hell for the
men who love you.”
“And hell, without the choice of heaven, for
ourselves,” returned Magda.
The bitterness in her voice wrung the old woman’s
heart. She sighed, then straightened her back
defiantly.
“We have to bear the burden of our blunders,
my dear.”
There was a reminiscent look in the keen old eyes.
Lady Arabella had had her own battles to fight.
“And, after all, who should pay the price if
not we ourselves?”
“But if the price is outrageous, Marraine?
What then?”
“Still you’ve got to pay.”
Magda returned home with those words ringing in her
ears. They fitted into the thoughts which had
been obsessing her with a curious precision.
It was true, then. You had to pay, one way or
another. Lady Arabella knew it. Little Suzette
had somehow found it out.
That night a note left Friars’ Holm addressed
to the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence.
GILLIAN INTERCEDES
It was a bald, austere-looking room. Magda glanced
about her curiously—at the plain, straight-backed
chairs, at the meticulously tidy desk and bare, polished
floor. Everything was scrupulously clean, but
the total absence of anything remotely resembling luxury
struck poignantly on eyes accustomed to all the ease
and beauty of surroundings which unlimited money can
procure.
By contrast with the severity of the room Magda felt
uncomfortably conscious of her own attire. The
exquisite gown she was wearing, the big velvet hat
with its drooping plume, the French shoes with their
buckles and curved Louis heels—all seemed
acutely out of place in this austere, formal-looking
chamber.
Her glance came back to the woman sitting opposite
her, the Mother Superior of the Sisters of Penitence—tall,
thin, undeniably impressive, with a stern, colourless
face as clean-cut as a piece of ivory, out of which
gleamed cold blue eyes that seemed to regard the dancer
with a strange mixture of fervour and hostility.
Magda could imagine no reason for the antagonism which
she sensed in the steady scrutiny of those light-blue
eyes. As far as she was concerned, the Mother
Superior was an entire stranger, without incentive
either to like or dislike her.
