“She has come to believe that you don’t want her—never could want her, Michael—because she has failed so much.”
There was more than one reproach mingled with the story, but Michael made no protest. It was only when she had finished that Gillian could read in his tortured eyes all that her narrative had cost him.
“Yes,” he said at last. “It’s true. I wanted the impossible. I was looking for a goddess—not a woman. . . . But now I want—just a woman, Gillian.”
“Then, if you want her, you must save her from herself. You’ve just twenty-four hours to do it in. To-morrow she’s still Magda. The next day she’ll be Sister Somebody. And you’ll have lost her.”
Half an hour later, when Michael’s nurse returned, she found her patient packing a suit-case with the assistance of a pretty, brown-haired girl whose eyes shone with the unmistakable brightness of recent tears.
“But you’re not fit to travel!” she protested in horrified dismay. “You mustn’t think of it, Mr. Quarrington.”
But Michael only laughed at her, defying her good-humouredly.
“If the man you loved were waiting for you in England, nurse, you know you’d go—and you wouldn’t care a hang whether you were fit to travel or not!”
The nurse smiled in spite of herself.
“No,” she admitted. “I suppose I shouldn’t.”