His indictment of her had left nothing to the imagination. She felt stunned, and, for the first time in her life, a little unwilling doubt of herself assaulted her. Was she really anything at all like the woman Michael Quarrington had pictured? A woman without heart or conscience—the “kind of woman he had no place for”?
She winced a little at the thought. It was strange how much she minded his opinion—the opinion of a man whom she had only met by chance and whom she was very unlikely ever to meet again. He himself had certainly evinced no anxiety to renew the acquaintance. And this, too, fretted her in some unaccountable way.
She could not analyse her own emotions. She felt hurt and angry and ashamed in the same breath—and all because an unknown man, an absolute stranger, had told her in no measured terms exactly what he thought of her!
Only—he was not really quite a stranger! He was the “Saint Michel” of her childhood days, the man with whom she had unconsciously compared those other men whom the passing years had brought into her life—and always to their disadvantage.
The first time she had seen him in the woods at Coverdale was the day when Hugh Vallincourt had beaten her; she had been smarting with the physical pain and humiliation of it. And now, this second time they had met, she had been once more forced to endure that strange and unaccustomed experience called pain. Only this time she felt as though her soul had been beaten, and it was Saint Michel himself who had scourged her.
The door at the far end of the room opened suddenly and a welcome voice broke cheerfully across the bitter current of her thoughts.
“Well, here I am at last! Has Magda arrived home yet?”
Davilof ceased playing abruptly and the speaker paused on the threshold of the room, peering into the dusk. Magda rose from her seat by the fire and switched on one of the electric burners.
“Yes, here I am,” she said. “Did you get held up by the fog, Gillian?”
The newcomer advanced into the circle of light. She was a small, slight woman, though the furs she was wearing served to conceal the slenderness of her figure. Someone had once said of her that “Mrs. Grey was a charming study in sepia.” The description was not inapt. Eyes and hair were brown as a beechnut, and a scattering of golden-brown freckles emphasised the warm tints of a skin as soft as velvet.