ith a quick, imperative gesture she hailed a taxi and was whirled away
towards Hampstead.

The first excited greetings and embraces were over. The flurry of
broken, scattered phrases, half-tearfully, half-smilingly welcoming her
back, had spent themselves, and now old Virginie, drawing away, regarded
her with bewildered, almost frightened eyes.

"_Mais, mon dieu_!" she muttered. "_Mon dieu_!" Then with a sudden cry:
"Cherie! Cherie! What have they done to thee? What have they done?"

"Done to me?" repeated Magda in puzzled tones. "Oh, I see! I'm thinner.
I've been ill, you know."

"It is not--that! Hast thou looked in the glass? Oh, my poor----" And
the old Frenchwoman incontinently began to weep.

A glass! Magda had not seen her own reflection in a looking-glass since
the day she left Friars' Holm. There were no mirrors hanging on the
walls of the house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt. Filled with a
nameless, inexplicable terror, she turned and walked out of the room.
There was an old Chippendale mirror hanging at the further end, but she
avoided it. Something in the askance expression of Virginie's eyes had
frightened her so that she dared not challenge what the mirror might
give back until she was alone.

Once outside the door she flew upstairs to her own room and, locking the
door, went to the glass. A stifled exclamation of dismay escaped her.
She had not dreamed a year could compass such an alteration! Then, very
deliberately, she removed her hat and, standing where the light fell
full upon her, she examined her reflection. After a long moment she
spoke, whisperingly, beneath her breath.

"Why--why--it isn't me, at all. I'm ugly. Ugly----"

With a quick movement she lifted her arm, screening her face against it
for a moment.

Her startled eyes had exaggerated the change absurdly. Nevertheless,
that a change had taken place was palpable. The arresting radiance, the
vivid physical perfection of her, had gone. She was thin, and with the
thinness had come lines--lines of fatigue, and other, more lasting lines
born of endurance and self-control. The pliant symmetry of her figure,
too, was marred. She stooped a little; the gay, free carriage of her
shoulders was gone. The heavy manual work at the sisterhood, of which,
in common with the others, she had done her share, had taken its toll
of her suppleness and grace, and the hands she extended in front of her,
regarding them distastefully, were roughene