Gillian’s thoughts tried to pierce the dim horizon.  Perhaps all the pain and mistakes and misunderstandings of which this workaday world is so full are, after all, only a part of the beautiful tapestry which the patient Fingers of God are weaving—­a dark and sombre warp, giving value to the gold and silver and jewelled threads of the weft which shall cross it.  When the ultimate fabric is woven, and the tissue released from the loom, there will surely be no meaningless thread, sable or silver, in the consummated pattern.

A few weeks after Magda’s departure Gillian received a letter from Dan Storran, reminding her of her promise to let him see her and asking if she would lunch with him somewhere in town.

It was with somewhat mixed feelings that she met him again.  He was much altered—­so changed from the hot-headed, primitive countryman she had first known.  Some chance remark of hers enlightened him as to her confused sense of the difference in him, and he smiled across at her.

“I’ve been through the mill, you see,” he explained quietly, “since the Stockleigh days.”

The words seemed almost like a key unlocking the door that stands fast shut between one soul and another.  He talked to her quite simply and frankly after that, telling her how, after he had left England, the madness in his blood had driven him whither it listed.  There had been no depths to which he had not sunk, no wild living from which he had recoiled.

And then had come the news of June’s death.  Not tenderly conveyed, but charged to his account by her sister with a fierce bitterness that had suddenly torn the veil from his eyes.  Followed days and nights of agonised remorse, and after that the slow, steady, infinitely difficult climb back from the depths into which he had allowed himself to sink to a plane of life where, had June still lived, he would not have been ashamed to meet her eyes nor utterly unworthy to take her hand.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do,” he ended.  “But she would have wished it.  I can never tell her now how I regret, never ask her forgiveness.  And this was the only thing I could do to atone.”

Gillian’s eyes were very soft as she answered: 

“I expect she knows, Dan, and is glad.”

After a moment she went on thoughtfully.

“It’s rather the same kind of feeling that has driven Magda into a sisterhood, I think—­the desire to do something definite, something tangible, as a sort of reparation.  And a woman is much more limited that way than a man.”

Storran’s mouth hardened.  Any mention of Magda would bring that look of concentrated hardness into his face, and as the months went on, giving Gillian a closer insight into the man, she began to realise that he had never forgiven Magda for her share in the ruin of his life.  On this point he was as hard as nether millstone.  He even seemed to derive a certain satisfaction from the knowledge that she was paying, and paying heavily, for all the harm she had wrought.