Once outside the door she flew upstairs to her own room and, locking the door, went to the glass.  A stifled exclamation of dismay escaped her.  She had not dreamed a year could compass such an alteration!  Then, very deliberately, she removed her hat and, standing where the light fell full upon her, she examined her reflection.  After a long moment she spoke, whisperingly, beneath her breath.

“Why—­why—­it isn’t me, at all.  I’m ugly.  Ugly——­”

With a quick movement she lifted her arm, screening her face against it for a moment.

Her startled eyes had exaggerated the change absurdly.  Nevertheless, that a change had taken place was palpable.  The arresting radiance, the vivid physical perfection of her, had gone.  She was thin, and with the thinness had come lines—­lines of fatigue, and other, more lasting lines born of endurance and self-control.  The pliant symmetry of her figure, too, was marred.  She stooped a little; the gay, free carriage of her shoulders was gone.  The heavy manual work at the sisterhood, of which, in common with the others, she had done her share, had taken its toll of her suppleness and grace, and the hands she extended in front of her, regarding them distastefully, were roughened and worn by the unwonted usage to which they had been subjected.  Her hair, so long, hidden from the light and air by the veil she had worn, was flaccid and lustreless.  Only her eyes remained unchangedly beautiful.  Splendid and miserable, they stared back at the reflection which the mirror yielded.

It was a long time before Magda reappeared downstairs, so long, indeed, that Gillian was beginning to grow nervously uneasy.  When at last she came, she was curiously quiet and responded to all Gillian’s attempts at conversation with a dull, flat indifference that was strangely at variance with the spontaneously happy excitement which had attended the first few moments after her arrival.

Gillian was acutely conscious of the difference in her manner, but even she, with all her intuition, failed to attribute it to its rightful cause.  To her, Magda was so indubitably, essentially the Magda she loved that she was hardly sensible of that shadowing of her radiant beauty which had revealed itself with a merciless clarity to the dancer herself.  And such change as she observed she ascribed to recent illness.

Meanwhile Magda got through that first evening at Friars’ Holm as best she might.  The hours seemed interminable.  She was aching for night to come, so that she might be alone with her thoughts—­alone to realise and face this new thing which had befallen her.

She had lost her beauty!  The one precious gift she had to give Michael, that lover of all beauty! . . .  The knowledge seemed to beat against her brain, throbbing and pulsing like a wound, while she made a pretence at doing justice to the little dinner party, which had been especially concocted for her under Virginie’s watchful eye, and responded in some sort to Coppertop’s periodic outbreaks of jubilation over her return.