Her mind, alertly prescient, divined significance in the mere wording of the phrase.
“Then there is—something?”
“Yes, there is something.”
His voice sounded forced, and Magda waited with a strange feeling of tension for him to continue.
“I want to ask you a question,” he went on in the same carefully measured accents. “Did you ever stay at a place called Stockleigh—Stockleigh Farm at Ashencombe?”
Stockleigh! At the sound of the word it seemed to Magda as though a hand closed suddenly round her heart, squeezing it so tightly that she could not breathe.
“I—yes, I stayed there,” she managed to say at last.
“Ah-h!” It was no more than a suddenly checked breath. “When were you there?” The question came swiftly, like the thrust of a sword. With it, it seemed to Magda that she could feel the first almost imperceptible pull of the “ropes of steel.”
“I was there—the summer before last,” she said slowly.
Michael made no answer. Only in the silence that followed she saw his face change. Something that had been hope—a fighting hope—died out of his eyes and his jaw seemed to set itself with a curious inflexibility.