everybody that she couldn't do
it, that it was all a mistake--that this was not a farewell! But she set
her teeth and moved resolutely towards her dressing-room.

As her fingers closed round the handle of the door, someone stepped out
from the shadows of the passage and spoke:

"Magda!"

The voice, wrung and urgent, was Antoine Davilof's.

Her first impulse was to hurry forward and put the dressing-room door
betwixt herself and him. She had not seen him since that night when he
had come down to the theatre and implored her to be his wife, warning
her that he would prevent her marriage with Michael. He had carried out
his threat with a completeness that had wrecked her life, and although,
since the breaking-off of her engagement, he had both written and
telephoned, begging her to see him, she had steadfastly refused. Once
he had come to Friars' Holm, but had been met with an inexorable "Not at
home!" from Melrose.

"Magda! For God's sake, give me a moment!"

Something in the strained tones moved her to an unexpected feeling
of compassion. It was the voice of a man in the extremity of mental
anguish.

Silently she opened the door of the dressing-room and signed to him to
follow her.

"Well," she said, facing him, "what is it? Why have you come?"

The impulse of compassion died out suddenly. His was the hand that had
destroyed her happiness. The sight of him roused her to a fierce anger
and resentment.

"Well?" she repeated. "What do you want? To know the result of your
handiwork?"--bitterly. "You've been quite as successful as even you
could have wished."

"Don't," he said unevenly. "Magda, I can't bear it. You can't give
up--all this. Your dancing--it's your life! I shall never forgive myself
. . . I'll see Quarrington and tell him--"

"You can't see him. He's gone away."

"Then I'll find him."

"If you found him, nothing you could say would make any difference,"
she answered unemotionally. "It's the facts that matter. You can't
alter--facts."

Davilof made a gesture of despair.

"Is it true you're going into some sisterhood?" he asked hoarsely.

"Yes."

"And it is I--I who have driven you to this! _Dieu_! I've been
mad--mad!"

His hands were clenched, his face working painfully. The hazel
eyes--those poet's eyes of his which she had seen sometimes soft with
dreams and sometimes blazing with love's fire--were blurred by misery.
They reminded her of the contrite, tortured eyes of a dog which,