He smiled a little.

“I’m not quite such a crock as I look.  But won’t you sit down yourself while I read this letter?  Is it of importance?”

“Oh!  Please read it!” exclaimed Gillian with sudden nervous impatience.

It seemed to her an eternity while he read the letter.  But at last he looked up from its perusal.

“Well?” she asked under her breath.

Very deliberately he refolded the sheet of notepaper and slipped it back into its envelope.

“It would have made no difference if I had received it earlier,” he said composedly.

“No difference”

“None.  Because, you see, this letter—­asking me to go back to Magda—­is written under a misapprehension.

“How?  What do you mean?”

“I mean—­that Magda has—­no further use for me.”

Gillian leaned forward.

“You’re wrong,” she said tersely—­“quite wrong.”

“No.”  He shook his head.  “I’m not blaming her.  Looking back, I’m not even very much surprised.  But still, the fact remains, she has no further use for me.”

“Will you tell me what makes you think that?” With an effort Gillian forced herself to speak quietly and composedly.

He was silent a moment, staring out of the window at the gay blue sea beyond, sparkling in the morning sunlight.  All at once he swung round on her, his face wrung with a sudden agony.

“I know,” he said in a roughened voice.  “I know, because I wrote to her—­six months ago.  I was hard, I know, brutally hard to her that last day at Friars’ Holm.  But—­God!  I paid for it afterwards!  And I wrote to her—­bared my very soul to her. . . .  Wrote so that if she had ever cared she must at least have answered me.”

He stopped abruptly, his face working.

“And she didn’t answer?”

A wry smile twisted his lips.

“I got my own letter back,” he said quietly.  “After all, that was an answer—­a conclusive one.”

Gillian was thinking rapidly.  Six months ago!  A momentary flash of recollection came to her.  So Lady Arabella, that wise old citizen of the world, had been quite right after all!  She had given Michael six months to find out his imperative need of Magda.  And he had found it.  Only—­something had gone wrong.

“Magda never had that letter,” she said quietly at last.

She was gradually beginning to piece together the separate parts of the puzzle.  All letters that came for Magda had been forwarded on to the sisterhood, and had she herself readdressed this of Michael’s she would have recognised the handwriting.  But probably she had been away from home, or had chanced to be out at post time, in which case Melrose, or old Virginie, would have readdressed the envelope and dropped it in the pillar box at the corner of the road.

Then—­as was the case with any correspondence addressed to one of the Sisters of Penitence—­the letter would be read by the Mother Superior and passed on to its destined recipient if she thought good.  If not——­