ance in the mere wording of
the phrase.

"Then there is--something?"

"Yes, there is something."

His voice sounded forced, and Magda waited with a strange feeling of
tension for him to continue.

"I want to ask you a question," he went on in the same
carefully measured accents. "Did you ever stay at a place called
Stockleigh--Stockleigh Farm at Ashencombe?"

Stockleigh! At the sound of the word it seemed to Magda as though a hand
closed suddenly round her heart, squeezing it so tightly that she could
not breathe.

"I--yes, I stayed there," she managed to say at last.

"Ah-h!" It was no more than a suddenly checked breath. "When were you
there?" The question came swiftly, like the thrust of a sword. With it,
it seemed to Magda that she could feel the first almost imperceptible
pull of the "ropes of steel."

"I was there--the summer before last," she said slowly.

Michael made no answer. Only in the silence that followed she saw his
face change. Something that had been hope--a fighting hope--died out of
his eyes and his jaw seemed to set itself with a curious inflexibility.

She waited for him to speak--waited with a keyed-up intensity of
longing that was almost physically painful. At last, unable to bear the
continued silence, she spoke again. Her voice cracked a little.

"Why--why do you ask, Michael?"

He looked at her and a sudden cynical amusement gleamed in his eyes--an
amusement so bitterly unmirthful that there seemed something almost
brutal about it. Her hand went up to her face as though to screen out
the sight of it.

"You can't guess, I suppose?" he said with dry, harsh irony. Then, after
a moment: "Why did you never tell me you were there? You never spoke of
it. . . . Wasn't it curious you should never speak of it?"

She made a step towards him. She could not endure this torturing
suspense another instant. It was racking her. She must know what
Stockleigh signified to him.

"What do you mean? Tell me what you mean!" she asked desperately.

"Do you remember the story I told you down at Netherway--of a man and
his wife and another woman?"

"Yes, I remember"--almost whispering.

"That was the story of my sister, June, and her husband, Dan Storran.
You--were the other woman."

She felt his eyes--those eyes out of which all hope had died--fixed on
her.

"June--your sister? Your sister? Are you sure?" she stammered stupidly.

It couldn't be true! Not even God could have thought of a pun