Very quietly she opened her door and stole out into the passage.  The house was strangely, wonderfully still.  Only the ticking of the hall-clock broke the silence.  So lightly that not a board creaked beneath her step, Magda flitted down the old stairway, and, crossing the hall, felt gingerly for the massive bolt which barred the heavy oaken door.  She wondered if it would slide back quietly; she rather doubted it.  She remembered often enough having heard it grate into its place as Storran went his nightly round, locking up the house.  But, as her slender, seeking fingers came in contact with the knob, she realised that to-night by some oversight he had forgotten to shoot the bolt and, noiselessly lifting the iron latch, she opened the door and slipped out into the moonlit garden.  Down the paths she went and across the lawns, the touch of the earth coming clean and cool to her bare feet.  Now and again she paused to draw a long breath of the night air, fresh and sweet with the lingering scents of the day’s blooming.

An arch of rambler roses led into the distant part of the garden towards which she was wending her way, its powdering of tiny blossoms gleaming like star clusters borrowed from the Milky Way.  Magda stooped as she passed beneath it to avoid an overhanging branch.  Then, as she straightened herself, lifting her head once more, she stood still, suddenly arrested.  On a stone bench, barely twenty yards away, sat Dan Storran!

Against the pallid ghost-white of the bench his motionless figure showed black and sombre like some sable statue.  His big shoulders were bowed, his hands hung loosely clasped between his knees, the white mask of his face, mercilessly revealed in the clear moonlight, was twisted into harsh lines of mental conflict.  A certain grim triumph manifested itself in the set of his mouth and out-thrust jaw.

He did not see the slight figure standing just within the shade of the rose-twined arch, and Magda remained for a moment or two watching him in silence.  The unbarred door was explained now.  Storran had not come in at all that night.  She guessed the struggle which had sent him forth to seek the utter solitude of the garden.  Almost she thought she could divine the processes of thought which had closed his lips in that strange line of ironic triumph.  He had told her to go—­when every nerve of him ached to bid her stay.  And he was glad that the strength in him had won.

A bitter smile flitted across her face.  Men were all the same!  They idolised a woman just because she was beautiful—­for her lips and eyes and hair and the nameless charm that was in her—­and set her up on an altar at which they could kneel becomingly.  Then, when they found she was merely an ordinary human being like themselves, with her bundle of faults and failings, hereditary and acquired, the prig in them was appropriately shocked—­and they went away!

An unhappy woman is very often a bitter one.  And Magda had been slowly learning the meaning of unhappiness for the first time in her life—­a life that had been hitherto roses and laurel all the way.