As Gillian mingled once more with the throng on the pavements she felt curiously unwilling to return home. She had set out from Friars' Holm so full of hope in her errand! It had seemed impossible that she could fail, and she had been almost unconsciously looking forward to seeing Magda's wan, strained face relax into half-incredulous delight as she confided in her the news that Michael was as eager and longing for a reconciliation as she herself.
And instead--this! This utter, hopeless failure to move him one jot. Only the memory of the man's stern, desperately unhappy eyes curbed the hot tide of her anger against him for his iron refusal.
He still loved Magda, so he said. And, indeed, Gillian believed it. But--love! It was not love as she and Tony Grey had understood it-- simple, forgiving, and wholly trustful. It seemed to her as though Michael and Magda were both wandering in a dim twilight of misunderstanding, neither of them able to see that there was only one thing for them to do if they were ever to find happiness again. They must thrust the past behind them--with all its bitterness and failures and mistakes, and go forward, hand in hand, in search of the light. Love would surely lead them to it eventually.
Yet this was the last thing either of them seemed able to think of doing. Magda was determined to spend the sweetness of her youth in making reparation for the past, while Michael was torn by bitterly conflicting feelings--his passionate love for Magda warring with his innate recoil from all that she had done and with his loyalty to his dead sister.
Gillian sighed as she threaded her way slowly along the crowded street. The lights of a well-known tea-shop beckoned invitingly and, only too willing to postpone the moment of her return home, she turned in between its plate-glass doors.
They swung together behind her, dulling the rumble of the traffic, while all around uprose the gay hum of conversation and the chink of cups and saucers mingling with the rhythmic melodies that issued from a cleverly concealed orchestra.
The place was very crowded. For a moment it seemed to Gillian as though there were no vacant seat. Then she espied an empty table for two in a distant corner and hastily made her way thither. She had barely given her order to the waitress when the swing doors parted again to admit someone else--a man this time.
The new arrival paused, as Gillian herself had done, to search out a seat. Then, noting the empty place at her table, he came quickly towards it.
Gillian was idly scanning the list of marvellous little cakes furnished by the menu, and her first cognisance of the new-comer's approach was the vision of a strong, masculine hand gripping the back of the chair opposite her preparatory to pulling it out from under the table.
"I'm afraid there's no other vacant seat," he was beginning apologetically. But at the sound of his voice Gillian's eyes flew up from that virile-looking hand to the face of its owner, and a low cry of surprise broke from her lips.
"Dan Storran!"
Simultaneously the man gave utterance to her own name.
Gillian stared at him stupidly. Could this really be Dan Storran-- Storran of Stockleigh?
The alteration in him was immense. He looked ten years older. An habitual stoop had lessened his apparent height and the dark, kinky hair was streaked with grey. The golden-tan bestowed by an English sun had been exchanged for the sallow skin of a man who has lived hard in a hot country, and the face was thin and heavily lined. Only the eyes of periwinkle-blue remained to remind Gillian of the splendid young giant she had known at Ashencombe--and even they were changed and held the cynical weariness of a man who has eaten of Dead Sea fruit and found it bitter to the taste.
There were other changes, too. Storran of Stockleigh was as civilised, his clothes and general appearance as essentially "right," as those of the men around him. All suggestion of the "cave-man from the backwoods," as Lady Arabella had termed him, was gone.
"I didn't know you were in England," said Gillian at last.
"I landed yesterday."
"You've been in South America, haven't you?"
She spoke mechanically. There seemed something forced and artificial about this exchange of platitudes between herself and the man who had figured so disastrously in Magda's life. Without warning he brought the conversation suddenly back to the realities.
"Yes. I was in 'Frisco when my wife died. Since then I've been half over the world."
Behind the harshly uttered statement Gillian could sense the unspeakable bitterness of the man's soul. It hurt her, calling forth her quick sympathy just as the sight of some maimed and wounded animal would have done.
"Oh!" she said, a sensitive quiver in her voice. "I was so sorry--so terribly sorry--to hear about June. We hadn't heard--we only knew quite recently." Her face clouded as she reflected on the tragic happenings with which the news had been accompanied.
At this moment a waitress paused at Storran's side and he gave his order. Then, looking curiously at Gillian, he said:
"What did you hear? Just that she died when our child was born, I suppose?"
Gillian's absolute honesty of soul could not acquiesce, though it would have been infinitely the easier course.
"No," she said, flushing a little and speaking very low. "We heard that she might have lived if--if she had only been--happier."
He nodded silently, rather as though this was the answer he had anticipated. Presently he spoke abruptly:
"Does Miss Vallincourt know that?"
Gillian hesitated. Then, taking her courage in both hands she told him quickly and composedly the whole story of the engagement and its rupture, and let him understand just precisely what June's death, owing to the special circumstances in which it had occurred, had meant for Magda of retribution and of heartbreak.
Storran listened without comment, in his eyes an odd look of concentration. The waitress dexterously slid a tray in front of him and he poured himself out a cup of tea mechanically, but he made no attempt to drink it. When Gillian ceased, his face showed no sign of softening. It looked hard and very weary. His strong fingers moved restlessly, crumbling one of the small cakes on the plate in front of him.
"'Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small,'" he quoted at last, quietly.
Gillian met his harshly cynical glance with one of brave defiance.
"I don't think God's mills have anything to do with it," she said swiftly. "He'd understand all the excuses and allowances that should be made for her better even than I do. And I shouldn't want to punish Magda. I'd make her--happy. She's never known what it means to be really happy. Success and gaiety aren't
happiness."
"And you?" he asked quickly.
There was a soft and wonderful shining in the brown eyes that were lifted to his.
"I had one year of utter happiness," she answered 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 river in spate. And now, whether the end were ultimate happiness or hopeless, irretrievable disaster, Michael and Magda must still fight their way towards it, each alone, by the dim light of that "blind Understanding" which is all that Destiny vouchsafes.