Then her eyes turned to the shop windows—­Catherine’s stern discipline had completely failed to stamp out the eternal feminine in her niece—­and as they absorbed the silken stuffs and rainbow colours that gleamed and glowed behind the thick plateglass, she became suddenly conscious of her own attire—­of its cut and style.  When last she had worn it, it had been the final word in fashionable raiment.  Now it was out of date.  The Wielitzska, whose clothes the newspapers had loved to chronicle, in a frock in which any one of the “young ladies” behind the counters of these self-same shops into which she was gazing would have declined to appear!  She almost laughed out loud.  And then, quick on the heels of her desire to laugh, came a revulsion of feeling.  This little incident, just the disparity between the fashion of her own clothes and the fashion prevailing at the moment, served to make her realise, with a curious clarity of vision, the irrevocable passage of time.  A year—­a slice out of her life!  What other differences would it ultimately show?

Something else was already making itself apparent—­the fact that none of the passers-by seemed to recognise her.  In the old days, when she had been dancing constantly at the Imperial Theatre, she had grown so used to seeing the sudden look of interest and recognition spring into the eyes of one or another, to the little eager gesture that nudged a companion, pointing out the famous dancer as she passed along the street, that she had thought nothing of it—­had hardly consciously noticed it.  Now she missed it—­missed it extraordinarily.

A sudden sense of intense loneliness swept over her—­the loneliness of the man who has been cast on a desert island, only returning to his fellows after many weary months of absence.  She felt she could not endure to waste another moment before she saw again the beloved faces of Gillian and Virginie and felt once more the threads of the old familiar life quiver and vibrate between her fingers.

With a quick, imperative gesture she hailed a taxi and was whirled away towards Hampstead.

The first excited greetings and embraces were over.  The flurry of broken, scattered phrases, half-tearfully, half-smilingly welcoming her back, had spent themselves, and now old Virginie, drawing away, regarded her with bewildered, almost frightened eyes.

“Mais, mon dieu!” she muttered. “Mon dieu!” Then with a sudden cry:  “Cherie!  Cherie!  What have they done to thee?  What have they done?”

“Done to me?” repeated Magda in puzzled tones.  “Oh, I see!  I’m thinner.  I’ve been ill, you know.”

“It is not—­that!  Hast thou looked in the glass?  Oh, my poor——­” And the old Frenchwoman incontinently began to weep.

A glass!  Magda had not seen her own reflection in a looking-glass since the day she left Friars’ Holm.  There were no mirrors hanging on the walls of the house where the Sisters of Penitence dwelt.  Filled with a nameless, inexplicable terror, she turned and walked out of the room.  There was an old Chippendale mirror hanging at the further end, but she avoided it.  Something in the askance expression of Virginie’s eyes had frightened her so that she dared not challenge what the mirror might give back until she was alone.