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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.
Gradually, with the passage of time, her thoughts reverted less and less often to the happenings at Stockleigh, and the prickings of conscience which beset her return to London grew considerably fainter and more infrequent. It was almost inevitable that this should be so. With the autumn came the stir and hustle of the season, with its thousand-and-one claims upon her thought and time.
From the moment he had come to Stockleigh the number and size of the said holes had increased appreciably, for, although five weeks had elapsed since the day of arrival, Coppertop was still revelling whole-heartedly in the incredible daily delights which, from the viewpoint of six years old, attach to a farm.
The mad, bizarre scene of the night before, with sudden unleashing of savage and ungoverned passions, had shaken even her insouciant poise, though she was very far from seeing it in its true proportions. June received Gillian's intimation that they proposed leaving Stockleigh Farm that day without comment.
'Women, sir, proceeded Keggs, 'young ladies are peculiar. I have had, if I may say so, certain hopportunities of observing their ways. Miss Elsa reminds me in some respects of Lady Angelica Fendall, whom I had the honour of knowing when I was butler to her father, Lord Stockleigh. Her ladyship was hinclined to be romantic. She was fond of poetry, like Miss Elsa.
And in the absorption of work and the sheer joy she found in the art which she loved, the recollection of her holiday at Stockleigh slipped by degrees into the background of her mind. Fraught with such immense significance and catastrophe to those others, Dan and June to Magda it soon came to occupy no more than an incidental niche in her memory.
"Still I don't know where this particular paradise is which you've selected," returned Gillian patiently. "It's at the back of beyond a tiny village in Devonshire called Ashencombe. I just managed to find it on the Ordnance map with a magnifying glass! The farm itself is called Stockleigh and is owned and farmed by some people named Storran. The answer to my letter was signed Dan Storran.
Magda hardly knew what impulse had bidden her save Dan Storran from himself check the hot utterance to which he had so nearly given voice and which to a certain extent she had herself provoked. Driven by the bitterness of spirit which Michael's treatment of her had engendered, she knew that she had flirted outrageously with Dan ever since she had come to Stockleigh.
Since, if these two were on the verge of becoming engaged, the mere fact would clear away the indefinable shadows which seemed to have been menacing her own happiness from the time Miss Vallincourt had come to Stockleigh. "Tea is just ready," she announced, approaching. "Will you come in? And perhaps your friend will have tea with us?" she added shyly.
He had hurt her as she had never been hurt before, and all that she craved now was change. Change and amusement to drug her mind so that she need not think. Whether anyone else got hurt in the process was a question that never presented itself to her. She had not expected to find amusement at Stockleigh.
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