CHAPTER VIII
THE FIRST REAPING
At breakfast, some hours later, Magda was in a curiously petulant and uncertain mood. To some extent her fractiousness was due to natural reaction after the emotional excitement of the previous evening. Granted the discovery of the Garden of Eden, and add to this the almost immediate intrusion of outsiders therein—for everybody else is an “outsider” to the pair in possession—and any woman might be forgiven for suffering from slightly frayed nerves the following day. And in Magda’s case she had been already rather keyed up by finding the preceding few days punctuated by unwelcome and unaccustomed happenings.
They all dated from the day of the accident which had befallen her in the fog. It almost seemed as though that grey curtain of fog had been a symbol of the shadow which was beginning to dog her footsteps—the shadow which stern moralists designate “unpleasant consequences.”
First there had been Michael Quarrington’s plain and candid utterance of his opinion of her. Then had followed Davilof’s headlong wooing and his refusal, when thwarted, to play for her again. He, too, had not precisely glossed things over in that tirade of accusation and reproach which he had levelled at her!
And now, just when it seemed as though she had put these other ugly happenings behind her, Kit Raynham, who for the last six months had been one of the little court of admirers which surrounded her, had seen fit to complicate matters by vanishing without explanation; while his mother, in an absurd maternal flurry of anxiety as to what had become of him, must needs write to her as though it inevitably followed that she was responsible for his disappearance!
Magda was conscious of an irritated sense of injury, which Gillian’s rather apprehensive little comments on the absence of further news concerning young Raynham scarcely tended to allay.
“Oh, don’t be tiresome, Gillian!” she exclaimed. “The boy’s all right. I expect he’s been having a joy-day—which has prolonged itself a bit.”
“It seems he hasn’t been seen or heard of since the day before yesterday,” responded Gillian gravely. “They’re afraid he may—may have committed suicide”—she brought out the word with a rush. “They’ve been dragging the lake at his home.”
Magda flared.