The end came abruptly. Quarrington chanced to
glance out of the window where the street lamps were
now glimmering serenely through a clear dusk.
The fog had lifted.
“Perhaps it’s just as well,” he
said shortly. “I was beginning—”
He checked himself and glanced at her with a sudden
stormy light in his eyes.
“Beginning—what?” she asked
a little breathlessly. The atmosphere had all
at once grown tense with some unlooked-for stress of
emotion.
“Shall I tell you?”
“Yes—tell me!”
“I was beginning to forget that you’re
the ‘type of woman I hate,’” he
said. And strode out of the room, leaving her
startled and unaccountably shaken.
When he came back he had completely reassumed his
former non-committal manner.
“There’s a taxi waiting for you,”
he announced. “It’s perfectly clear
outside now, so I think you will be spared any further
adventures on your way home.”
He accompanied her into the hall, and as they shook
hands she murmured a little diffidently:
“Perhaps we shall meet again some time?”
He drew back sharply.
“No, we shan’t meet again.”
There was something purposeful, almost vehemently
so, in the curtly spoken words. “If I had
thought that——”
“Yes?” she prompted. “If you
had?”
“If I’d thought that,” he said quietly,
“I shouldn’t have dared to risk this last
half-hour.”
A momentary silence fell between them. Then,
with a shrug, he added lightly:
“But we shan’t meet again. I’m
leaving England next week. That settles it.”
Without giving her time to make any rejoinder he opened
the street-door and stood aside for her to pass out.
A minute later she was in the taxi, and he was standing
bare-headed on the pavement beside it.
“Good-bye,” she said. “Good-bye—Saint
Michel.”
His hand closed round hers in a grip that almost crushed
the slender fingers.
“You!” he cried hoarsely.
There was a note of sudden, desperate recognition
in his voice. “You!”
As Magda smiled into his startled eyes—the
grey eyes that had burned their way into her memory
ten years ago—the taxi slid away into the
lamp-lit dusk.
FRIARS’ HOLM
With a grinding of brakes the taxi slowed up and came
to a standstill at Friars’ Holm, the quaint
old Queen Anne house which Magda had acquired in north
London.
Once within the high wall enclosing the old-world
garden in which it stood, it was easy enough to imagine
oneself a hundred miles from town. Fir and cedar
sentinelled the house, and in the centre of the garden
there was a lawn of wonderful old turf, hedged round
in summer by a riot of roses so that it gleamed like
a great square emerald set in a jewelled frame.
Magda entered the house and, crossing the cheerfully
lit hall, threw open the door of a room whence issued
the sound of someone—obviously a first-rate
musician—playing the piano.
