“It’s not a pretty story,” he remarked harshly.
Magda glanced towards the picture. The enchanting, tilted face smiled at her from the canvas, faintly derisive.
“Tell it me,” was all she said.
“There’s very little to tell,” he answered briefly. “There was a man and his wife—and another woman. Till the latter came along they were absolutely happy together—sufficient unto each other. The other woman was one of the Circe type, and she broke the man. Broke him utterly. I happened to be in Paris at the time, and he came to see me there on his way out to South America. He’d left his wife, left his work—everything. Just quitted! Since then I believe ‘Frisco has seen more of him than any other place. A man I know ran across him there and told me he’d gone under—utterly.”
“And the wife?”
“Dead”—shortly. “She’d no heart to go on living—no wish to. She died when their first child was born—she and the child together—a few months after her husband had left her.”
Magda uttered a stifled cry of pity, but Quarrington seemed not to hear it.
“That woman was a twentieth-century Circe.” He paused, then added with grim conviction: “There’s no forgiveness for a woman like that.”
“Ah! Don’t say that!”
The words broke impulsively from Magda’s lips. The recollection of the summer she had spent at Stockleigh rushed over her accusingly—and she realised that actually she had come between Dan Storran and his wife very much as the Circe woman of Michael’s story had come between some other husband and wife.