“Yes.  But I haven’t been particularly good.  I’ve just done whatever it occurred to me to do without considering the consequences.  I expect I shall be made to take my consequences all in a heap together one day.”

Gillian smiled.

“Then I suppose we shall all of us have to rally round and get you out of them,” she said cheerfully.

“Perhaps—­perhaps you wouldn’t be able to.”

There was a strange note of foreboding in Magda’s voice—­an accent of fatality, and despite herself Gillian experienced a reflex sense of uneasiness.

“Nonsense!” she said brusquely.  “What on earth has put all these ridiculous notions into your head?”

Magda smiled at her.  “I think it was four lines I read in a book yesterday.  They set me thinking.”

“More’s the pity then!” grumbled Gillian.  “What were they?”

Magda was silent a moment, looking out over the sea with abstracted eyes.  It was so blue to-day—­all blue and gold in the dancing sunlight.  But she knew that self-same sea could be grey—­grey and chill as death.

Her glance came slowly back to Gillian’s face as she quoted the fragment of verse which had persisted in her thoughts: 

     “To-day and all the still unborn To-morrows
     Have sprung from Yesterday.  For Woe or Weal
     The Soul is weighted by the Burden of Dead Days—­
     Bound to the unremitting Past with Ropes of Steel.”

After a moment she added: 

“Even you couldn’t cut through ‘ropes of steel,’ my Gillyflower.”

Gillian tried to shrug away this fanciful depression of the moment.

“Well, by way of a counterblast to your dejection of spirit, I propose to send an announcement of your engagement to the Morning Post.  You’re not meaning to keep it private after we get back to town, are you?”

“Oh, no.  It was only that I didn’t want to be pestered with congratulations while we were down here.  I suppose they’ll have to come some day”—­with a small grimace of disgust.

“You’ll be snowed under with them,” Gillian assured her encouragingly.

The public announcement of the engagement preceded Magda’s return from Netherway by a few days, so that by the time the Hermitage house-party actually broke up, its various members returning to town, all London was fairly humming with the news.  The papers were full of it.  Portraits of the fiances appeared side by side, together with brief histories of their respective careers up to date, and accompanied by refreshing details concerning their personal tastes.

“Dear me, I never knew Michael had a passion for raw meat before,” remarked Magda, after reading various extracts from the different accounts aloud for Gillian’s edification.

“Has he?” Gillian was arranging flowers and spoke somewhat indistinctly, owing to the fact that she had the stem of a chrysanthemum between her lips.