clear
outside now, so I think you will be spared any further adventures on
your way home."

He accompanied her into the hall, and as they shook hands she murmured a
little diffidently:

"Perhaps we shall meet again some time?"

He drew back sharply.

"No, we shan't meet again." There was something purposeful, almost
vehemently so, in the curtly spoken words. "If I had thought that----"

"Yes?" she prompted. "If you had?"

"If I'd thought that," he said quietly, "I shouldn't have dared to risk
this last half-hour."

A momentary silence fell between them. Then, with a shrug, he added
lightly:

"But we shan't meet again. I'm leaving England next week. That settles
it."

Without giving her time to make any rejoinder he opened the street-door
and stood aside for her to pass out. A minute later she was in the taxi,
and he was standing bare-headed on the pavement beside it.

"Good-bye," she said. "Good-bye--_Saint Michel_."

His hand closed round hers in a grip that almost crushed the slender
fingers.

"_You_!" he cried hoarsely. There was a note of sudden, desperate
recognition in his voice. "_You_!"

As Magda smiled into his startled eyes--the grey eyes that had burned
their way into her memory ten years ago--the taxi slid away into the
lamp-lit dusk.

CHAPTER III

FRIARS' HOLM

With a grinding of brakes the taxi slowed up and came to a standstill at
Friars' Holm, the quaint old Queen Anne house which Magda had acquired
in north London.

Once within the high wall enclosing the old-world garden in which it
stood, it was easy enough to imagine oneself a hundred miles from town.
Fir and cedar sentinelled the house, and in the centre of the garden
there was a lawn of wonderful old turf, hedged round in summer by a
riot of roses so that it gleamed like a great square emerald set in a
jewelled frame.

Magda entered the house and, crossing the cheerfully lit hall, threw
open the door of a room whence issued the sound of someone--obviously a
first-rate musician--playing the piano.

As she opened the door the twilight, shot by quivering spears of light
from the fire's dancing flames, seemed to rush out at her, bearing
with it the mournful, heart-shaking music of some Russian melody. Magda
uttered a soft, half-amused exclamation of impatience and switched on
the lights.

"All in the dark, Davilof?" she asked in a practical tone of voice
calculated to disintegrate any possible fabric of romance woven o