rapping the world
in a passionless, chill winding-sheet.

With a little broken cry she stumbled forward on to her knees, her arms
outflung across the table.

CHAPTER XXIII

ACCOUNT RENDERED

The long, interminable night was over at last. Never afterwards, all
the days of her life, could Magda look back on the black horror of those
hours without a shudder. She felt as though she had been through hell
and come out on the other side, to find stretching before her only the
blank grey desolation of chaos.

She was stripped of everything--of love, of happiness, even of hope.
There was nothing in the whole world to look forward to. There never
would be again. And when she looked back it was with eyes that had been
vouchsafed a terrible enlightenment.

Phrases which had fallen from Michael's lips scourged her anew
throughout the long hours of the night. "Women like you make this world
into plain hell," he had said. "You're like a blight--spreading disease
and corruption wherever you go." And the essential truth which each
sentence held left her writhing.

It was all true--horribly, hideously true. The magical, mysterious power
of beauty which had been given her, which might have helped to lighten
the burden of the sad old world wherever she passed, she had used to
destroy and deface and mutilate. The debt against her--the debt of all
the pain and grief which she had brought to others--had been mounting
up, higher and higher through the years. And now the time had come when
payment was to be exacted.

Quite simply and directly, without seeking in any way to exculpate
herself, she had told Gillian the bare facts of what had happened--that
her engagement was broken off and the reason why. But she had checked
all comment and the swift, understanding sympathy which Gillian would
have given. Criticism or sympathy would equally have been more than she
could bear.

"There is nothing to be said or done about it," she maintained. "I've
sinned, and now I'm to be punished for my sins. That's all."

The child of Hugh Vallincourt spoke in that impassive summing up of the
situation and Lady Arabella, with her intimate knowledge of both Hugh
and his sister Catherine, would have ascribed it instantly to the
Vallincourt strain in her god-daughter. To Gillian, however, to whom the
Vallincourts were nothing more than a name, the strange submissiveness
of it was incomprehensible. As the days passed, she tried to rouse
Magda fr