Magda nodded. Her eyes were wistful.
“Yes, go to her. I think mothers must understand—as other people can’t ever understand. She will be glad to have you with her, Antoine.”
He was silent for a moment, his eyes dwelling on her face as though he sought to learn each line of it, so that when she would be no more beside him he might carry the memory of it in his heart for ever.
“Then it is good-bye,” he said at last.
Magda held out her hands and, taking them in his, he drew her close to him.
“I love you,” he said, “and I have brought you only pain.” There was a tragic simplicity in the statement.
“No,” she answered steadily. “Never think that. I spoiled my own life. And—love is a big gift, Antoine.”
She lifted her face to his and very tenderly, almost reverently, he kissed her. She knew that in that last kiss there was no disloyalty to Michael. It held renunciation. It accepted forgiveness.
“Did you know that Dan Storran was in front to-night?” asked Gillian, as half an hour later she and Magda were driving back to Hampstead together. She had already confided the fact of her former meeting with him in the tea-shop.
Magda’s eyes widened a little.