“Why didn’t you?” she asked impulsively.

He laughed.

“Because it’s so much easier to yield to temptation than to resist,” he answered, not taking his eyes from her face.

She flushed a little.

“What was the temptation?” she asked uncertainly.

He waited an instant, then answered with deliberation: 

“The temptation of seeing you again.”

“I should have thought you disapproved of me far too much for that to be the case!  Saint Michel, don’t you think you’re rather hard on me?”

“Am I?  I had an old-fashioned mother, you see.  Perhaps my ideas about women are out of date.”

“Tell me them.”

He regarded her reflectively.

“Shall I?  Well, I like to think of a woman as something sweet and fragrant, infinitely tender and compassionate—­not as a marauder and despoiler.  Wherever she comes, the place should be the happier for her coming—­not bereft by it.  She should be the helper and healer in this battered old world.  That’s the sort of woman I should want my wife to be; that’s the sort of woman my mother was.”

“And you think I’m—­not like that?  I’m the marauder, I suppose?”

He remained silent, and Magda sat with her bent head, fingering the stem of her wine-glass restlessly.

“You like my dancing?” she said at last.

“You know I do.”

“Well”—­she looked at him with a mixture of defiance and appeal.  “My dancing is me—­the real me.”

He shook his head.

“You’re not the ‘Swan-Maiden,’ whose love was so great that she forgot everything except the man she loved—­and paid for it with her life.”

“The process doesn’t sound exactly encouraging,” she retorted with a flash of dry humour.  “But how do you know I’m not—­like that?”

“How do I know?  Because, if you knew anything at all about love, you couldn’t pay with it as you do.  Even the love you’ve no use for is the biggest thing the poor devil who loves you has to offer you; you’ve no right to play battledore and shuttlecock with it.”

He spoke lightly, but Magda could hear the stern accusation that underlay the words.  She rose from the table abruptly.

“I think,” she said, “I think I’m afraid of love.”

As she spoke, she made a movement as though to quit the supper-room, but, either by accident or design, Michael barred her way.

“Love,” he said, watching her face intently, “means sacrifice—­surrender.”

“And you believe I’m not capable of it?”

“I think,” he replied slowly, drawing aside to let her pass, “I think I’m afraid to believe.”

Something in the deep tones of his voice sent a thrill of consciousness through her.  She felt her breath come and go unevenly and, afraid to trust herself to speak, she moved forward without response in the direction of the door.  A moment later they were drawn into the stream of people wending their way by twos and threes towards the ballroom.