But she knew now. As
the empty weeks dragged along she learned what it meant to long for the
beloved one's presence--the sound and touch of voice or hand--with an
aching, unassuagable longing that seems to fuse body and soul into a
single entity of pain.

Outwardly she appeared unchanged. Her pride was indomitable, and
exactly how much Michael's going had meant to her not even Gillian
suspected--though the latter was too sensitive and sympathetic not to
realise that Magda had passed through some experience which had touched
her keenly. Ignorant of the incidents that had occurred on the night of
Lady Arabella's party, she was disposed to assign the soreness of spirit
she discerned in her friend to the general happenings which had followed
from the Raynham episode. And amongst these she gave a certain definite
place to the abrupt withdrawal of Quarrington's friendship, and
resented it. She felt curiously disappointed in the man. With such fine
perceptive faculty as he possessed she would have expected him to be
more tolerant--more merciful in his judgment.

Once she had tentatively approached the subject, but Magda had clearly
indicated that she had no intention of discussing it.

Not even to Gillian, whom she had gradually come to look upon as her
closest friend, could Magda unveil the wound to her pride. No one, no
one in the whole world, should know that she had been ready to give
her love--and that the offering had been silently, but none the less
decisively, rejected.

Diane's warning now found its echo in her own heart: "Never give your
heart to any man. If you do he will only break it for you--break it into
little pieces like the glass scent-bottle which you dropped yesterday."

"She was right," Magda told herself bitterly. "A thousand times right!"

CHAPTER IX

THE BACK OF BEYOND

The season was drawing to its close. London lay sweltering under a
heat-wave which had robbed the trees in the Park of their fresh June
greenness and converted the progress of foot-passengers along its sultry
pavements into something which called to mind the mediaeval ordeal of
walking over hot ploughshares.

Even the garden at Friars' Holm, usually a coolly green oasis in the
midst of the surrounding streets, seemed as airless as any back court or
alley, and Coppertop, who had been romping ever more and more flaggingly
with a fox-terrier puppy he had recently acquired, finally gave up the
effort and flung himself down, r