His face clouded over.

“The experience of a friend of mine.”

Magda caught her breath.

“Not--you don’t mean-----”

“Oh, no”—­divining her thought—­“not the friend of whom you know—­who loved the dancer.  She hurt him”—­looking at her significantly—­“but she didn’t injure him to that extent.  Circe turned men into swine, you remember.  My friend was too fine a character for her to spoil like that.”

“I’m glad.”  Magda spoke very low, her head bent.  She felt unable to meet his eyes.  After a short silence she asked:  “Then what inspired—­this picture?”

Was it some woman-episode that had occurred while he was abroad which had scored those new lines on his face, embittering the mouth and implanting that sternly sad expression in the grey eyes?  She must know—­at all hazards, she must know!

Quarrington lit a cigarette.

“It’s not a pretty story,” he remarked harshly.

Magda glanced towards the picture.  The enchanting, tilted face smiled at her from the canvas, faintly derisive.

“Tell it me,” was all she said.

“There’s very little to tell,” he answered briefly.  “There was a man and his wife—­and another woman.  Till the latter came along they were absolutely happy together—­sufficient unto each other.  The other woman was one of the Circe type, and she broke the man.  Broke him utterly.  I happened to be in Paris at the time, and he came to see me there on his way out to South America.  He’d left his wife, left his work—­everything.  Just quitted!  Since then I believe ’Frisco has seen more of him than any other place.  A man I know ran across him there and told me he’d gone under—­utterly.”

“And the wife?”

“Dead”—­shortly.  “She’d no heart to go on living—­no wish to.  She died when their first child was born—­she and the child together—­a few months after her husband had left her.”

Magda uttered a stifled cry of pity, but Quarrington seemed not to hear it.

“That woman was a twentieth-century Circe.”  He paused, then added with grim conviction:  “There’s no forgiveness for a woman like that.”

“Ah!  Don’t say that!”

The words broke impulsively from Magda’s lips.  The recollection of the summer she had spent at Stockleigh rushed over her accusingly—­and she realised that actually she had come between Dan Storran and his wife very much as the Circe woman of Michael’s story had come between some other husband and wife.

A deep compassion for that unknown woman surged up within her.  Surely her burden of remorse must be almost more than she could endure!  And Magda—­to whom penalties and consequences had hitherto been but very unimportant factors with which she concerned herself as little as possible—­was all at once conscious of an intense thankfulness that she had not been thus punished, that she had quitted Stockleigh leaving husband and wife still together.  Together, they would find the way back into each other’s hearts!