vation when Magda suddenly took the matter out of her hands.

"There's nothing newfangled about tea out-of-doors, on a glorious day
like this," she said. "It's the only sensible thing to do. You don't
really mind, do you?"

She smiled up at him provocatively and his sombre face lightened.

"Not if you like it," he replied shortly.

"Well, I do. So sit down and be pleased--instead of looking like a
thundercloud, please." The softness in her voice robbed the speech of
its sharpness. "I have a friend here--and we're having tea outside in
his honour."

She introduced the two men, who exchanged a few commonplace words--each,
meanwhile, taking the measure of the other through eyes that were
frankly hostile. They were of such dissimilar type that there was
practically no common ground upon which they could meet, and with the
swift, unerring intuition of the lover each had recognised the other as
standing in some relationship to Magda which premised a just cause for
jealousy. Both men endeavoured to secure her undivided attention and,
failing lamentably, their mutual antagonism deepened, smouldering
visibly beneath the stiff platitudes they exchanged with one another.

Gillian, thrust rather into the position of an onlooker, watched
the proceedings with amused eyes--her amusement only tempered by the
slightly apprehensive feeling concerning Magda of which she had been
vaguely conscious from the first moment she had found her in Davilof's
company, and which continued to obsess her.

True, she no longer wore that set, still look which Gillian had observed
on her face prior to Dan Storran's appearance upon the scene. But even
when she smiled and talked, playing the men off one against the other
with a deft skill that was inimitable, there seemed a curious new
hardness underlying it all--a certain reckless deviltry for which
Gillian was at a loss to account.

June watched, too, with troubled eyes. Half an hour ago she had been
feeling ridiculously happy, comfortably assured in her own mind that
this tall, rather exquisite foreigner and the woman whose presence
in her home had occasioned so much bitter heart-burning were only
hesitating, as it were, on the brink of matrimony. And now--now she did
not know what to think! Miss Vallincourt was treating Davilof with an
airy negligence that to June's honest and candid soul seemed altogether
incompatible with such circumstances.

Meanwhile, with her own ears attuned to catch eac