f a skin as soft as velvet.

"Did I get held up?" she repeated. "My dear, I walked miles--miles, I
tell you!--in that hideous fog. And then found I'd been walking entirely
in the wrong direction! I fetched up somewhere down Notting Hill Gate
way, and at last by the help of heaven and a policeman discovered the
Tube station. So here I am. But if I could have come across a taxi I'd
have been ready to _buy_ it, I was so tired!"

"Poor dear!" Magda was duly sympathetic. "We'll have some tea. You'll
stay, Davilof?"

"I think not, thanks. I'm dining out"--with a glance at his watch. "And
I shan't have too much time to get home and change as it is."

Magda held out her hand.

"Good-bye, then. Thank you for keeping me company till Gillian came."

There was a sudden sweetness of gratitude in the glance she threw at him
which fired his blood. He caught her hand and carried it to his lips.

"The thanks are mine," he said in a stifled voice. And swinging round on
his heel he left the room abruptly, quite omitting to make his farewells
to Mrs. Grey.

The latter looked across at Magda with a gleam of mirth in her brown
eyes. Then she shook her head reprovingly.

"Will you never learn wisdom, Magda?" she asked, subsiding into a chair
and extending a pair of neatly shod feet to the fire's warmth.

Magda laughed a little.

"Well, it won't be the fault of my friends if I don't!" she returned
ruefully. "Marraine expended a heap of eloquence over my misdeeds this
afternoon."

"Lady Arabella? I'm glad to hear it. Though she has about as much chance
of producing any permanent result as the gentleman who occupied his
leisure time in rolling a stone uphill."

"Cat!" Magda made a small grimace at her. "Ah, here's some tea!"
Melrose, known among Magda's friends as "the perfect butler," had come
noiselessly into the room and was arranging the tea paraphernalia with
the reverential precision of one making preparation for some mystic
rite. "Perhaps when you've had a cup you'll feel more amiable--that is,
if I give you lots of sugar."

"What was the text of Lady Arabella's homily?" inquired Gillian
presently, as she sipped her tea.

"Oh, that boy, Kit Raynham," replied Magda impatiently. "It appears I'm
blighting his young prospects--his professional ones, I mean. Though I
don't quite see why an attack of calf-love for me should wreck his work
as an architect!"

"I do--if he spends his time sketching 'the Wielitzska' in half a do