“Apropos of such offerings—don’t you think it would be wiser if you weren’t quite so nice to Dan Storran?”
“Am I nice to him?”
“Too much so for my peace of mind—or his! It worries me, Magda—really. You’ll play with fire once too often.”
“My dear Gillian, I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself. Do you imagine”—with a small, fine smile—“that I’m in danger of losing my heart to a son of the soil?”
Gillian could have shaken her.
“You? You don’t suppose I’m afraid for you! It’s Dan Storran who isn’t able to look after himself.” She stooped over Magda’s chair and slipped an arm persuasively round her shoulders. “Come away, Magda. Let’s leave Stockleigh—go home to London.”
“Certainly not.” Magda stood up suddenly. “I’m quite well amused down here. I don’t propose to leave till our time is up.”
She spoke with unmistakable decision, and Gillian, feeling that it would be useless to urge her further at the moment, went slowly out of the room and upstairs. As she went she could hear Dan’s footstep in the passage below. It sounded tired—quite unlike his usual swinging stride with its suggestion of impetuous force.
But it was not work that had tired Dan Storran that afternoon. When he had quitted the little party gathered beneath the elms, he had started off across the fields, unheeding where he went, and for hours he had been tramping, deaf and blind to the world around him, immersed in the thoughts that had driven him forth.
The full significance of the last few weeks had suddenly come home to him. Till now he had been drifting—drifting unthinkingly, conscious only that life had become extraordinarily full of interest and of a breathless kind of happiness, half sweet, half bitter. Bitter when Magda was not with him, sweet with a maddening sweetness when she was.