His expression answered her and her face changed—grew suddenly radiant, transfigured. “Oh, Saint Michel—Saint Michel! Then there is one thing I can do, one gift I have still left to give! Oh, my dear, I can take away the shadow!” Her voice breathless and shaken, she told him how June had died—all that Dan Storran had learned from the doctor who had attended her.
“I know I hurt her—hurt her without thinking. But oh, Michael! Thank God, it wasn’t through me that she died!”
And Michael, as he folded his arms about her, knew that the shadow which had lain between him and the woman he loved was there no longer. They were free—freed from those “ropes of steel” which had held them bound. Free to go together and find once more their Garden of Eden.
Presently, when those first perfect moments of reunion were past, Magda gave utterance to the doubts and perplexities that still vexed her soul.
“Pain may purify,” she said slowly. “But it spoils, Michael, and blots, and ruins. I think, after all, pain is meaningless.”
Michael’s grey, steady eyes met her troubled ones.
“I don’t think pain—just as pain—purifies,” he answered quickly. “Pain is merely horrible. It is the willingness to suffer that shrives us—not the pain itself.”
Later still, the essential woman in her came into its own again. “I shall never be able to sit for you any more, Saint Michel,” she said regretfully. “I’m nobody’s model—now!”
She could see only her lost beauty—the unthinking, radiant beauty of mere youth. But Michael could see all that her voluntary renunciation and atonement had bestowed in its stead of more enduring significance.
He took her by the hand and led her to the mirror.