He shook his head.
“I shall not lose patience—until you are another man’s wife,” he said quietly. “And I don’t intend you to be that.”
An hour later, Gillian, having dispatched her small son to bed and seen him safely tucked up between the lavender-scented sheets, discovered Magda alone in the low-raftered sitting-room. She was lying back idly in a chair, her hands resting on the arms, in her eyes a curious abstracted look as though she were communing with herself.
Apparently she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice Gillian’s entrance, for she did not speak.
“What are you thinking about? Planning a new dance that shall out-vie The Swan-Maiden?” asked Gillian at last, for the sake of something to say. The silence and Magda’s strange aloofness frightened her in some way.
It was quite a moment before Magda made any answer. When she did, it was to say with a bitter kind of wonder in her voice:
“What centuries ago it seems since the first night of The Swan-Maiden!”
“It’s not very long,” began Gillian, then checked herself and asked quickly: “Is there anything the matter, Magda? Did Antoine bring you bad news of some kind?”
“He brought me the offering of his hand and heart. That’s no news, is it?”
The opening was too good to be lost. With the remembrance of June’s wistful face before her eyes, Gillian plunged in recklessly.