ering through the dense gloom. "Ah!" She
felt his outstretched hands close on her shoulders as she knelt huddled
on the floor. "Can you get up? Or are you hurt?"

Magda tested her limbs cautiously, to discover that no bones were
broken, though her head ached horribly, so that she felt sick and giddy
with the pain.

"No, I'm not hurt," she answered.

"Then come along. The car's heeled up a bit, but I'll lift you out if
you can get to the door."

She stumbled forward obediently, groping her way towards the vague panel
of lighter grey revealed by the open door.

Once more, out of the swathing fog, hands touched her.

"There you are! That's right. Now lean forward."

She found herself clasped by arms like steel--so strong, so sure, that
she felt as safe and secure as when Vladimir Ravinski, the amazingly
clever young Russian who partnered her in several of her dances,
sometimes lifted her, lightly and easily as a feather, and bore her
triumphantly off the stage aloft on his shoulder.

"You're very strong," she murmured, as the unknown owner of the arms
swung her down from the tilted car.

"You're not very heavy," came the answer. There was a kind of laughter
in the voice.

As the man spoke he set her down on her feet, and then, just as Magda
was opening her lips to thank him, the fog seemed to grow suddenly
denser, swirling round her in great murky waves and surging in her ears
with a noise like the boom of the ocean. Higher and higher rose the
waves, a resistless sea of blackness, and at last they swept right over
her head and she sank into the utter darkness of oblivion.

"Drink this!"

Someone was holding a glass to her lips and the pungent smell of sal
volatile pricked her nostrils. Magda shrank back, her eyes still shut,
and pressed her head further into the cushions against which it rested.
She detested the smell of sal volatile.

"Drink it! Do you hear?"

The voice seemed to drive at her with its ring of command. She opened
her eyes and looked straight up into other eyes--dark-grey ones,
these--that were bent on her intently. To her confused consciousness
they appeared to blaze down at her.

"No," she muttered, feebly trying to push the glass away.

The effort of moving her arm seemed stupendous. Her head swam with it.
The sea of fog came rolling back again, and this time she sank under it
at once.

Then--after an immensity of time, she was sure--she felt herself
struggling up to the surfac