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.
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.
