er own
sore-heartedness under a manner that was rather more militant than
usual, if that were possible.

"Why you hadn't more sense than to spend your time fooling with a sort
of cave-man from the backwoods, I can't conceive," she scolded. "You
must have known how it would end."

"I didn't. I never thought about it. I was just sick with Michael
because he had gone abroad, and then, when I heard that he was married,
it was the last straw. I don't think--that night--I should have much
cared what happened."

Lady Arabella nodded.

"Women like you make it heaven or hell for the men who love you."

"And hell, without the choice of heaven, for ourselves," returned Magda.

The bitterness in her voice wrung the old woman's heart. She sighed,
then straightened her back defiantly.

"We have to bear the burden of our blunders, my dear."

There was a reminiscent look in the keen old eyes. Lady Arabella had had
her own battles to fight. "And, after all, who should pay the price if
not we ourselves?"

"But if the price is outrageous, Marraine? What then?"

"Still you've got to pay."

Magda returned home with those words ringing in her ears. They fitted
into the thoughts which had been obsessing her with a curious precision.
It was true, then. You had to pay, one way or another. Lady Arabella
knew it. Little Suzette had somehow found it out.

That night a note left Friars' Holm addressed to the Mother Superior of
the Sisters of Penitence.

CHAPTER XXIV

GILLIAN INTERCEDES

It was a bald, austere-looking room. Magda glanced about her
curiously--at the plain, straight-backed chairs, at the meticulously
tidy desk and bare, polished floor. Everything was scrupulously clean,
but the total absence of anything remotely resembling luxury struck
poignantly on eyes accustomed to all the ease and beauty of surroundings
which unlimited money can procure.

By contrast with the severity of the room Magda felt uncomfortably
conscious of her own attire. The exquisite gown she was wearing, the big
velvet hat with its drooping plume, the French shoes with their buckles
and curved Louis heels--all seemed acutely out of place in this austere,
formal-looking chamber.

Her glance came back to the woman sitting opposite her, the Mother
Superior of the Sisters of Penitence--tall, thin, undeniably impressive,
with a stern, colourless face as clean-cut as a piece of ivory, out of
which gleamed cold blue eyes that seemed to regard the