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Updated: June 22, 2025
She glanced towards the window through which was visible a discouraging fog of the "pea-soup" variety. Lady Arabella sniffed. "You'd better be careful for once in your life, Magda. Davilof is in love with you." "Pouf! What if he is?"
Magda was duly sympathetic. "We'll have some tea. You'll stay, Davilof?" "I think not, thanks. I'm dining out" with a glance at his watch. "And I shan't have too much time to get home and change as it is." Magda held out her hand. "Good-bye, then. Thank you for keeping me company till Gillian came." There was a sudden sweetness of gratitude in the glance she threw at him which fired his blood.
To Magda it seemed almost as if his quiet speech held the gravity of prophecy, and she shivered a little. "And when that time comes, then you'll come back to me," he added. Magda threw up her head, defying him. "You propose to be waiting round to pick up the pieces, then?" she suggested nonchalantly. But only the sound of the closing door answered her. Davilof had gone.
None but himself knew how bitterly she had hurt him, how cruelly she had stung his pride, when she had flung him that contemptuous command: "I shall want you to-morrow, Davilof! same time." He had unveiled his very soul before her and in return she had tossed him an order as though he were a lackey who had taken a liberty. All his pain and brooding resentment came boiling up to the surface.
"You can't see him. He's gone away." "Then I'll find him." "If you found him, nothing you could say would make any difference," she answered unemotionally. "It's the facts that matter. You can't alter facts." Davilof made a gesture of despair. "Is it true you're going into some sisterhood?" he asked hoarsely. "Yes." "And it is I I who have driven you to this! Dieu! I've been mad mad!"
He would probably rave a little, despairing in the picturesque and dramatic fashion characteristic of him, and the sooner he "got it out of his system," as Gillian had observed on one occasion, the better for everyone concerned. So Magda braced herself for the interview, and prepared to receive a tragical and despondent Davilof.
But with her thoughts preoccupied by the work in hand she failed to notice it, and, advancing till she faced the great mirror, she executed a few steps in front of it, humming the motif of The Swan-Maiden music under her breath. "Play, Antoine," she threw at him over her shoulder. Davilof hesitated, made a movement towards her, then wheeled round abruptly and went to the piano.
The note of lament sounded with increasing insistence through the slowing ripple of the accompaniment, and at last, as Magda sank to the ground in a piteous attitude that somehow suggested both the drooping grace of a dying swan and the innocence and helplessness of the hapless maiden, the music died away into silence. There was a little pause. Then Davilof sprang to this feet. "By God, Magda!
"Antoine Davilof is not one of a crowd never will be! He's half a Pole, remember." Magda smiled. "And I'm half a Russian. It must be a case of deep calling to deep," she suggested mockingly. Lady Arabella's shining needles clicked as they came to an abrupt stop. "Does that mean you're in love with him?" she asked. Magda stared. "Good gracious, no! I'm never in love. You know that."
And, anyway" with a wicked little grin "Davilof won't have quite such a clear coast as he anticipated." "But if Michael Quarrington is married " "He isn't," interrupted Lady Arabella briskly. "It was contradicted in the papers the very next morning. Only I suppose Davilof hustled off to Devonshire in such a hurry that he never saw it. "Contradicted? But how did such a mistake arise?"
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