red gently. "And I've got
Coppertop--so I can't ever be quite unhappy."

"If there were more women like you----" he began abruptly.

She shook her head.

"No, no," she said, smiling a little. "If there were more men like Tony!
You men are so hard--so cruelly hard."

He looked at her very directly.

"Haven't I the right to be?" he demanded bitterly.

"Ah! Forgive me!" Gillian spoke with an accent of self-reproach. "I'd
forgotten you still--care."

"For Magda?" He laughed shortly. "No. That's dead, thank God! I killed
it. Worked it out of my system in 'Frisco"--with exceeding bitterness.
"Then I got the news of June's death. Her sister wrote me. Told me she
died because she'd no longer any wish to live. That sobered me-brought
me back to my sense. There was a good deal more to the letter--my
sister-in-law didn't let me down lightly. I've had to pay for that
summer at Stockleigh. And now Magda's paying. . . . Well, that seems to
square things somehow."

"Oh, you are brutal!" broke out Gillian.

His eyes, hard as steel and as unyielding, met hers.

"Am I?"--indifferently. "Perhaps I am."

This was a very different Dan from the impetuous, hot-headed Dan
of former times. Gillian found his calm ruthlessness difficult to
understand, and yet, realising all that he had suffered, she could not
but condone it to a certain extent.

When at last she rose to go, he detained her a moment.

"I am remaining in England now. I should like to see you sometimes. May
I?"

She hesitated. Then something that appealed in the tired eyes impelled
her answer.

"If you wish," she said gently.

Back once more in the street she made her way as quickly as possible to
the nearest tube station, in order to reach it before the usual
evening crowd of homeward-wending clerks and typists poured into the
thoroughfares from a thousand open office doors. But as soon as she
was safely seated in the train her thoughts reverted to the two strange
interviews in which she had taken part that afternoon.

She felt very low-spirited. Since she had seen and talked with the two
men in whose lives Magda had played so big a part, she was oppressed
with a sense of the utter hopelessness of trying to put matters right.
Things must take their course--drive on to whatever end, bitter or
sweet, lay hidden in the womb of fate.

She had tried to stem the current of affairs, but she had proved as
powerless to deflect it as a dried stick tossed on to a r