“You won’t be able to keep away,”
she replied.
“I will never play for you again,” he
repeated. “Never! I will teach myself
to hate you.”
She shook her head lightly.
“Impossible, Davilof.”
“It’s not impossible. There’s
very little difference between love and hate—sometimes.
And I want all or nothing.”
“I’m afraid it must be nothing, then.”
“We shall see. But if I can’t have
you, I swear no other man shall!”
She glanced up at him, lifting her brows a little.
“Aren’t you going too far, Antoine?
You can hate me, if you like, or love me—it’s
a matter of indifference to me which you do. But
I don’t propose to allow you to arrange my life
for me. And in any case”—after
a moment—“I’m not likely to
fall in love—with you or anyone else.”
“You think not?” He stood looking down
at her sombrely. “You’ll fall in
love right enough some day. And when you do it
will be all or nothing with you, too. You’re
that kind. Love will take you—and break
you, Magda.”
He spoke slowly, with an odd kind of tensity.
To Magda it seemed almost as if his quiet speech held
the gravity of prophecy, and she shivered a little.
“And when that time comes, then you’ll
come back to me,” he added.
Magda threw up her head, defying him.
“You propose to be waiting round to pick up
the pieces, then?” she suggested nonchalantly.
But only the sound of the closing door answered her.
Davilof had gone.
THE SWAN-MAIDEN
Lady Arabella was in her element. She had two
brilliant and unattached young men dining with her—one,
Michael Quarrington, a lion in the artistic world,
and the other, Antoine Davilof, who showed unmistakable
symptoms of developing sooner or later into a lion
in the musical world.
It was Davilof who was responsible for the artist’s
presence at Lady Arabella’s dinner table.
She had expressed—in her usual autocratic
manner—a wish that he should be presented
to her, and had determined upon the evening of the
first performance of The Swan-Maiden as the
appointed time.
Davilof appeared doubtful, and declared that Quarrington
was leaving England and had already fixed the date
of his departure.
“He’s crossing from Dover the very day
before the one you want him to dine with you,”
he told her.
But Lady Arabella swept his objections aside with
regal indifference.
“Crossing, is he?” she snapped. “Well,
tell him I want him to dine here and go to the show
with us afterwards. He’ll cross the day
after, you’ll find—if he crosses
at all!” she wound up enigmatically.
So it came about that her two lions, the last-arrived
artist and the soon-to-arrive musician, were both
dining with her on the appointed evening.
