me back and want Magda--want her _badly_. And find he
couldn't get her! So there!"

Lady Arabella regarded her with astonishment, then broke into a
delighted chuckle.

"Upon my word! If a tame dove had suddenly turned round and pecked at
me, I couldn't have been more surprised! I didn't know you had so much
of the leaven of malice and wickedness in you, Gillian!"

Gillian, a little flushed and feeling, in truth, rather surprised at
herself for her sudden heat, smiled back at her.

"But I should have thought your opinion would have been very much the
same as mine. I never expected you'd want Magda to sit down and twiddle
her thumbs till Michael chose to come back to her."

Lady Arabella sighed.

"I don't. Not really. Only I want them to be happy," she said a little
sadly. "Love is such a rare thing--love like theirs. And it's hard that
Magda should lose the beauty and happiness of it all because of mistakes
she made before she found herself, so to speak."

Gillian nodded soberly. Lady Arabella had voiced precisely her own
feeling in the matter. It _was_ hard! And yet it was only the fulfilment
of the immutable law: _Who breaks, pays_.

Gillian's thoughts tried to pierce the dim horizon. Perhaps all the pain
and mistakes and misunderstandings of which this workaday world is so
full are, after all, only a part of the beautiful tapestry which the
patient Fingers of God are weaving--a dark and sombre warp, giving value
to the gold and silver and jewelled threads of the weft which shall
cross it. When the ultimate fabric is woven, and the tissue released
from the loom, there will surely be no meaningless thread, sable or
silver, in the consummated pattern.

A few weeks after Magda's departure Gillian received a letter from Dan
Storran, reminding her of her promise to let him see her and asking if
she would lunch with him somewhere in town.

It was with somewhat mixed feelings that she met him again. He was much
altered--so changed from the hot-headed, primitive countryman she
had first known. Some chance remark of hers enlightened him as to her
confused sense of the difference in him, and he smiled across at her.

"I've been through the mill, you see," he explained quietly, "since the
Stockleigh days."

The words seemed almost like a key unlocking the door that stands fast
shut between one soul and another. He talked to her quite simply and
frankly after that, telling her how, after he had left England, the
mad