Raynham rose from a low chair near the fire. She was a little,
insignificant woman, rather unfashionably attired, with neat grey
hair and an entirely undistinguished face, but as she stood there,
motionless, waiting for Magda to come up to her, she was quite
unconsciously impressive--transformed by that tragic dignity with which
great sorrow invests even the most commonplace of people.

Her thin, middle-aged features looked drawn and puckered by long hours
of strain. Her eyes were red-rimmed with sleeplessness. They searched
Magda's face accusingly before she spoke.

"What have you done to my son?"

"Where is he?" Magda's answering question came in almost breathless
haste.

"You don't know!"

Lady Raynham sat down suddenly. Her legs were trembling beneath her--had
been trembling uncontrollably even as she nerved herself to stand and
confront the woman at whose door she laid the ruin of her son. But now
the spurt of nervous energy was exhausted, and she sank back into her
chair, thankful for its support.

"I don't know where he is," she said tonelessly. "I don't even know
whether he is alive or dead."

She fumbled in the wrist-bag she carried, and withdrawing a crumpled
sheet of notepaper held it out. Magda took it from her mechanically,
recognising, with a queer tightening of the muscles of her throat, the
boyish handwriting which sprawled across it.

"You want me to read this?" she asked.

"You've _got_ to read it," replied the other harshly. "It is written to
you. I found it--after he'd gone."

Her gaze fastened on Magda's face and clung there unwaveringly while she
read the letter.

It was a wild, incoherent outpouring--the headlong confession of a
boy's half-crazed infatuation for a beautiful woman. A pathetic
enough document in its confused medley of passionate demand and boyish
humbleness. The tragic significance of it was summed up in a few lines
at the end--lines which seemed to burn themselves into Magda's brain:

"I suppose it was cheek my hoping you could ever care, but you were so
sweet to me you made me think you did. I know now that you don't--that
you never really cared a brass farthing, and I'm going right away. The
same world can't hold us both any longer. So I'm going out of it."

Magda looked up from the scrawled page and met the gaze of the sad,
merciless eyes that were fixed on her.

"Couldn't you have left him alone?" Lady Raynham spoke in a low,
difficult voice. "You have me