But Magda’s face remained clouded.
“But even that isn’t—all,” she answered. “It’s—oh, it’s a heap of things! Somehow I thought when I came back I should see the road clear. But it isn’t. It’s all shadowed—just as it was before. I thought I should have so much to give Michael now. And I haven’t anything. I don’t think I ever quite realised before that, however much you try to atone, you can never undo the harm you’ve done. But I’ve had time to think things out while I was with the Sisters.”
“And if you go back to them you’ll have time to do nothing but think for the rest of your life!” flashed back Gillian.
“Oh, no!” Magda spoke quickly. “I shouldn’t return under a vow of penitence. There are working sisters attached to the community who go about amongst the sick and poor in the slums. I should join as a working sister if I went back.”
Gillian stared at her in amazement. Magda devoting her life to good works seemed altogether out of the picture! She began to feel that the whole affair was getting too complicated for her to handle, and as usual, when in a difficulty, she put the matter up to Lady Arabella.
The latter, with her accumulated wisdom of seventy years, saw more clearly than the younger woman, although even she hardly understood that sense of the deadly emptiness and failure of her life which had overwhelmed Magda since her return to Friars’ Holm. But the old woman realised that she had passed through a long period of strain, and that, now the reaction had come, the Vallincourt blood in her might drive her into almost any extreme of conduct.
“If only Michael were on the spot!” she burst out irritably. “I own I’m disappointed in the man! I was so sure six months would bring him to his senses.”
“I know,” assented Gillian miserably. “It’s—it’s—the most hopeless state of things imaginable!”
Lady Arabella’s interview with Magda herself proved unproductive.
“Have you written to Michael?” she demanded.