“CHILDREN STUMBLING IN THE DARK”
As Gillian mingled once more with the throng on the
pavements she felt curiously unwilling to return home.
She had set out from Friars’ Holm so full of
hope in her errand! It had seemed impossible that
she could fail, and she had been almost unconsciously
looking forward to seeing Magda’s wan, strained
face relax into half-incredulous delight as she confided
in her the news that Michael was as eager and longing
for a reconciliation as she herself.
And instead—this! This utter, hopeless
failure to move him one jot. Only the memory
of the man’s stern, desperately unhappy eyes
curbed the hot tide of her anger against him for his
iron refusal.
He still loved Magda, so he said. And, indeed,
Gillian believed it. But—love!
It was not love as she and Tony Grey had understood
it—simple, forgiving, and wholly trustful.
It seemed to her as though Michael and Magda were
both wandering in a dim twilight of misunderstanding,
neither of them able to see that there was only one
thing for them to do if they were ever to find happiness
again. They must thrust the past behind them—with
all its bitterness and failures and mistakes, and
go forward, hand in hand, in search of the light.
Love would surely lead them to it eventually.
Yet this was the last thing either of them seemed
able to think of doing. Magda was determined
to spend the sweetness of her youth in making reparation
for the past, while Michael was torn by bitterly conflicting
feelings—his passionate love for Magda warring
with his innate recoil from all that she had done
and with his loyalty to his dead sister.
Gillian sighed as she threaded her way slowly along
the crowded street. The lights of a well-known
tea-shop beckoned invitingly and, only too willing
to postpone the moment of her return home, she turned
in between its plate-glass doors.
They swung together behind her, dulling the rumble
of the traffic, while all around uprose the gay hum
of conversation and the chink of cups and saucers
mingling with the rhythmic melodies that issued from
a cleverly concealed orchestra.
The place was very crowded. For a moment it seemed
to Gillian as though there were no vacant seat.
Then she espied an empty table for two in a distant
corner and hastily made her way thither. She had
barely given her order to the waitress when the swing
doors parted again to admit someone else—a
man this time.
The new arrival paused, as Gillian herself had done,
to search out a seat. Then, noting the empty
place at her table, he came quickly towards it.
Gillian was idly scanning the list of marvellous little
cakes furnished by the menu, and her first cognisance
of the new-comer’s approach was the vision of
a strong, masculine hand gripping the back of the chair
opposite her preparatory to pulling it out from under
the table.
