“God!” he muttered thickly.  “What are you made of?  You make men go through hell for you!  Even here—­here in this little country place—­you do it!  Storran’s wife—­one can see her heart breaks, and it is you who are breaking it.  Yet nothing touches you!  You’ve no conscience like other women—­no heart—­”

Magda pulled herself out of his grasp.

“Oh, do forget that I’m a woman, Davilof!  I’m a dancer.  Nothing else matters.  I don’t want to be troubled with a heart.  And—­and I think they left out my soul.”

“Yes,” he agreed with intense bitterness.  “I think they did.  One day, Magda some man will kill you.  You’ll try him too far.”

“Indeed?  Is that what you contemplate doing when you finally lose patience with me?”

He shook his head.

“I shall not lose patience—­until you are another man’s wife,” he said quietly.  “And I don’t intend you to be that.”

An hour later, Gillian, having dispatched her small son to bed and seen him safely tucked up between the lavender-scented sheets, discovered Magda alone in the low-raftered sitting-room.  She was lying back idly in a chair, her hands resting on the arms, in her eyes a curious abstracted look as though she were communing with herself.

Apparently she was too absorbed in her own thoughts to notice Gillian’s entrance, for she did not speak.

“What are you thinking about?  Planning a new dance that shall out-vie The Swan-Maiden?” asked Gillian at last, for the sake of something to say.  The silence and Magda’s strange aloofness frightened her in some way.

It was quite a moment before Magda made any answer.  When she did, it was to say with a bitter kind of wonder in her voice: 

“What centuries ago it seems since the first night of The Swan-Maiden!”

“It’s not very long,” began Gillian, then checked herself and asked quickly:  “Is there anything the matter, Magda?  Did Antoine bring you bad news of some kind?”

“He brought me the offering of his hand and heart.  That’s no news, is it?”

The opening was too good to be lost.  With the remembrance of June’s wistful face before her eyes, Gillian plunged in recklessly.

“Apropos of such offerings—­don’t you think it would be wiser if you weren’t quite so nice to Dan Storran?”

“Am I nice to him?”

“Too much so for my peace of mind—­or his!  It worries me, Magda—­really.  You’ll play with fire once too often.”

“My dear Gillian, I’m perfectly capable of looking after myself.  Do you imagine”—­with a small, fine smile—­“that I’m in danger of losing my heart to a son of the soil?”

Gillian could have shaken her.

“You? You don’t suppose I’m afraid for you!  It’s Dan Storran who isn’t able to look after himself.”  She stooped over Magda’s chair and slipped an arm persuasively round her shoulders.  “Come away, Magda.  Let’s leave Stockleigh—­go home to London.”