ed or effective.

Left to herself, Gillian sighed unhappily. Almost she wished they
had never come to Stockleigh, only that it was pure joy to her to see
Coppertop's rather thin little cheeks filling out and growing sunburnt
and rosy. He had not picked up strength very readily after his attack of
croup, and subsequently the intense heat in London had tried him a good
deal.

But she was gradually becoming apprehensive that disturbing consequences
might accrue from Magda's stay at Stockleigh Farm. A woman of her
elusive charm, equipped with all the subtle lore that her environment
had taught her, must almost inevitably hold for a man of Storran's
primitive way of life the fascination of something new and rather
wonderful. To contrast his wife with her was to contrast a field-flower
with some rare, exotic bloom, and Gillian was conscious of a sudden rush
of sympathy for June's unarmoured youth and inexperience.

Magda's curiously uncertain moods of late, too, had worried her not a
little. She was unlike herself--at times brooding and introspective, at
other times strung up to a species of forced gaiety--a gaiety which had
the cold sparkle of frost or diamonds. With all her faults Magda had
ever been lovably devoid of bitterness, but now it seemed as though she
were developing a certain new quality of hardness.

It puzzled Gillian, ignorant of that sudden discovery and immediate loss
of the Garden of Eden. It might have been less of an enigma to old Lady
Arabella, to whom the jigsaw puzzle of human motives and impulses was
always a matter of absorbing interest, and who, as more or less an
onlooker at life during the last thirty years, had become an adept in
the art of fitting the pieces of the puzzle together.

Magda herself was only conscious of an intense restlessness and
dissatisfaction with existence in general. She reflected bitterly that
she had been a fool to let slip her hold of herself--as she had done the
night of Lady Arabella's reception--even for a moment.

It had been thoroughly drilled into her both by precept and example--her
mother's precept and her father's example--that to let a man count for
anything much in her life was the biggest mistake a woman could make,
and Michael's treatment of her had driven home the truth of all the
warnings Diane had instilled.

He had hurt her as she had never been hurt before, and all that she
craved now was change. Change and amusement to drug her mind so that
she