“What did he say?” The words were almost inaudible.
Lady Arabella hesitated. Then she quoted quickly: “‘There is no need. She will understand.’”
To Magda the brief sentence held all the finality of the bolting and barring of a door. So Quarrington, like everyone else, had heard the story of Kit Raynham! And he had judged and sentenced her.
That night in the winter-garden he had been on the verge of trusting her, ready to believe in her, and she had vowed to herself that she would prove worthy of his trust. She had meant never to fall short of all that Michael demanded in the woman he loved. And now, before she had had a chance to justify his hardly-won belief, the past had risen up to destroy her, surging over her like a great tidal wave and sweeping away the whole fabric of the happiness she had visioned.
She had not wholly realised before that she loved. 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!”