THE EDGE OF THE DAWN

Magda paused outside the closed door of the room. She knew whom she
would see within. Lady Arabella had told her he was there waiting for
her.

Her first impulse had been to refuse to meet him. Then the temptation
to see him again--just once more--before she passed out of his life
altogether, rushed over her like the surge of some resistless sea,
sweeping everything before it.

Very quietly she opened the door and went into the room.

"Magda!"

She never knew whether he really uttered her name or whether it was
only the voiceless, clamorous cry of his whole consciousness--of a man's
passionate demand for the woman who is mate of his soul and body.

But she answered its appeal, her innermost being responding to the claim
of it. All recollection of self, of the dimming of her beauty, even of
the great gulf of months that lay between them, crowded with mistakes
and failure, was burned away in the white-hot flame of love that blazed
up within her.

She ran to him, and that white, searing flame found its expression in
the dear human tenderness of the little cry that broke from her as he
turned his gaunt face towards her.

"Oh, Saint Michel! Saint Michel! How dreadfully ill you look! Oh, my
dear--sit down! You're not fit to stand!"

But when that first instinctive cry had left her lips, memory came
flooding over her once more. She shrank back from him, covering her face
with her hands, agonisingly conscious of the change in herself--of that
shadowing of her beauty which the sensitiveness of a woman in love had
so piteously magnified.

Then, drawing her hands slowly down, she braced herself to say what must
be said.

"You are free of me, Michael." She spoke in a curious, still voice. "I
know Marraine and Gillian between them have brought you back. But you
are free of me. As you see--I shall never do any more harm. No other man
will come to grief for the sake of the Wielitzska. . . . I determined
that as I had made others pay, so I would pay. I think"--suddenly moving
towards the window and standing full in the brilliant sunlight--"I think
you'll agree I've settled the bill."

Michael came to her side.

"I want you for my wife," he said simply.

She held out her work-roughened hands, while the keen-edged sunlight
pitilessly revealed the hollowed line of cheek and throat, the
lustreless dark hair, the fine lines that Pain, the great Sculptor, had
graved about her mouth.

"You are an ar