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A faint fragrance of dried lavender drifted out from the dark depths of the cupboard. Diane always afterwards associated the smell of lavender with her memories of Catherine Vallincourt, and the sweet, clean scent of it was spoiled for her henceforward. "I hate you!" she exclaimed in a low voice of helpless rage. "I hate you and I wish to God Hugh had never had a sister!"
In like manner had sprung to life the love between Hugh Vallincourt and Diane Wielitzska, and rarely has the web of love enmeshed two more dissimilar and ill-matched people Hugh, a man of seven-and-thirty, the strict and somewhat self-conscious head of a conspicuously devout old English family, and Diane, a beautiful dancer of mixed origin, the illegitimate offspring of a Russian grand-duke and of a French artist's model of the Latin Quarter.
I've been out of touch with the whole Vallincourt family for so many years now that I don't know what has become of them." "You don't mean to say that you're going to let Magda do what she proposes?" exclaimed Gillian, in dismayed astonishment. "There's never much question of 'letting' Magda do things, is there?" retorted Lady Arabella.
"You've acted the part of an unmitigated coward, Vallincourt salving your own fool conscience at your wife's expense. Even if you no longer love her " "But I do love her," protested Hugh. "I I worship her!" Jim Lancaster stared. In common with most medical men he was more or less used to the odd vagaries of human nature, but Hugh's attitude struck him as altogether incomprehensible.
Vallincourt had been brought up on severely conventional lines, reared in the narrow tenets of a family whose salient characteristics were an overweening pride of race and a religious zeal amounting almost to fanaticism, while Diane had had no up-bringing worth speaking of. As for religious views, she hadn't any.
And coincidentally, just as in the case of her father, the abrupt downfall of her hopes, the sudden shattering of her happiness, seemed as though it were due to the intervention of an angry God. The fanatical Vallincourt blood which ran in Magda's veins caused her to respond instinctively to this aspect of the matter.
More than once she tried to soften his attitude, tried to make him realise something of the conflicting influences both of temperament and environment which had helped to make Magda what she was. But he remained stubbornly unmoved. "No punishment is too severe for a woman who has done what Magda Vallincourt has done.
If these months of discipline brought her nearer him, then she would never grudge them. The serene eyes of the Sister who received her Sister Bernardine helped to steady her quivering pulses. There was something in Sister Bernardine that was altogether lacking in Catherine Vallincourt a delightfully human understanding and charity for all human weakness, whether of the soul or body.
As with Hugh Vallincourt, whose blood ran in her veins, the idea of personal renunciation made a curious appeal to her emotional temperament, and she was momentarily filled with something of the martyr's ecstasy. Gillian's arms clung round Magda's neck convulsively as she kissed her at the great gates of Friars' Holm a few hours later. "Good-bye! . . . Ah, Magda! Come back to me!"
The flower-girl treasured the smile of the great Wielitzska in her memory for many a long day, while in the arid months that were to follow Magda treasured the sweet fragrance of that spontaneous gift. Half an hour later the doors of the grey house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt apart from the world opened to receive Magda Vallincourt, and closed again behind her.
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