ally, dancers have a lot to put up with--or rather, to put up
_without_! Magda never dares to enjoy a good square meal. Afraid of
getting fat, of course! After all, a dancer's figure's her fortune."

Like a low, insistent undertone beneath the rattle of Lady Arabella's
volubility Michael could hear again the murmur of a soft, dragging
voice: "I'm sorry you're going away, Saint Michel."

It seemed almost as though Lady Arabella, with that uncanny shrewdness
of hers, divined it.

"You'll come, then?" She smiled at him over her shoulder, moving forward
as the crush in the vestibule lessened a little.

And Michael, with an odd expression in his eyes, answered suddenly:

"Yes, I'll come."

Later, as Lady Arabella and Gillian drove home together, the former
laughed quietly. There was an element of pride and triumph in the
laughter. Probably the hen who has reared a duckling and sees it sail
off into the water experiences, alongside her natural apprehension and
astonishment, a somewhat similar pride in the startling proclivities
evinced by her nurseling.

"That nice artist-man is in love with Magda," crowed Lady Arabella
contentedly.

Gillian smiled.

"Do you think so?"

"I do. Only it's very much against his will, for some reason or other.
Crossing from Dover to-morrow, forsooth!"--with a broad smile. "Not he!
He'll be at my party--and asking Magda to marry him before the week's
out, bar accidents! . . . After all, it's not surprising that the men
are falling over each other to marry her. She's really rather wonderful.
Where do you think she gets it all from, Gillian, my dear? Not from the
Vallincourts, I'll swear!"--chuckling.

Mrs. Grey shook her head.

"I don't know. But I think Magda is a standing argument in favour of the
doctrine of reincarnation! She always seems to me to be a kind of modern
embodiment of Helen of Troy or Cleopatra."

"Only without the capacity for falling in love! She's as chilly as an
iceberg and yet somehow gives you the idea she's all fire and passion.
No wonder the men get misled, poor lambs!"

"She's not cold, really," asserted Gillian positively. "Of that I'm
sure. No one could dance as she does--and be an iceberg."

Lady Arabella chuckled again, wickedly.

"A woman who can dance like that ought to be preceded through life by
a red flag. She positively stirs my old blood--that's been at a
comfortably tepid temperature for the last thirty years!"

"Some day," said Gillia