iving nothing in
return.

Probably Suzette had been an attractive little person--of the same
type of brown-eyed, vivacious youth which must have been Virginie's
five-and-thirty years ago--and her prettiness had caused her downfall.
Magda glanced towards the mirror. It was through her beauty she herself
had sinned. It had given her so much power, that exquisite, perfect body
of hers, and she had pitifully misused the power it had bestowed. The
real difference between herself and Suzette lay in the fact that
the little French girl had paid the uttermost farthing of the price
demanded--had submitted herself to discipline till she had surely
expiated all the evil she had done. What if she, likewise, were to seek
some such discipline?

The idea had presented itself to her at precisely the moment when she
was in the grip of an agony of recoil from her former way of life. Like
her father, she had been suddenly brought up short and forced to survey
her actions through the eyes of someone else, to look at all that she
had done from another's angle of vision. And coincidentally, just as
in the case of her father, the abrupt downfall of her hopes, the
sudden shattering of her happiness, seemed as though it were due to the
intervention of an angry God.

The fanatical Vallincourt blood which ran in Magda's veins caused her
to respond instinctively to this aspect of the matter. But the strain
of her passionate, joy-loving mother which crossed with it tempered the
tendency toward quite such drastic self-immolation as had appealed to
Hugh Vallincourt.

To Magda, Michael had come to mean the beginning and end of
everything--the pivot upon which her whole existence hung. So that
if Michael shut her out of his life for ever, that existence would no
longer hold either value or significance. From her point of view, then,
the primary object of any kind of self-discipline would be that it might
make her more fit to be the wife of "Saint Michel."

He despised her now. The evil she had done stood between them like
a high wall. But if she were to make atonement--as Suzette had
atoned--surely, when the wickedness had been purged out of her by pain
and discipline, Michael would relent!

The idea lodged in her mind. It went with her by day and coloured her
thoughts by night, and it was still working within her like yeast when
she at last nerved herself to go and see her godmother.

Lady Arabella, as might have been anticipated, concealed h