The end came abruptly.  Quarrington chanced to glance out of the window where the street lamps were now glimmering serenely through a clear dusk.  The fog had lifted.

“Perhaps it’s just as well,” he said shortly.  “I was beginning—­” He checked himself and glanced at her with a sudden stormy light in his eyes.

“Beginning—­what?” she asked a little breathlessly.  The atmosphere had all at once grown tense with some unlooked-for stress of emotion.

“Shall I tell you?”

“Yes—­tell me!”

“I was beginning to forget that you’re the ‘type of woman I hate,’” he said.  And strode out of the room, leaving her startled and unaccountably shaken.

When he came back he had completely reassumed his former non-committal manner.

“There’s a taxi waiting for you,” he announced.  “It’s perfectly clear outside now, so I think you will be spared any further adventures on your way home.”

He accompanied her into the hall, and as they shook hands she murmured a little diffidently: 

“Perhaps we shall meet again some time?”

He drew back sharply.

“No, we shan’t meet again.”  There was something purposeful, almost vehemently so, in the curtly spoken words.  “If I had thought that——­”

“Yes?” she prompted.  “If you had?”

“If I’d thought that,” he said quietly, “I shouldn’t have dared to risk this last half-hour.”

A momentary silence fell between them.  Then, with a shrug, he added lightly: 

“But we shan’t meet again.  I’m leaving England next week.  That settles it.”

Without giving her time to make any rejoinder he opened the street-door and stood aside for her to pass out.  A minute later she was in the taxi, and he was standing bare-headed on the pavement beside it.

“Good-bye,” she said.  “Good-bye—­Saint Michel.”

His hand closed round hers in a grip that almost crushed the slender fingers.

“You!” he cried hoarsely.  There was a note of sudden, desperate recognition in his voice. “You!”

As Magda smiled into his startled eyes—­the grey eyes that had burned their way into her memory ten years ago—­the taxi slid away into the lamp-lit dusk.

CHAPTER III

FRIARS’ HOLM

With a grinding of brakes the taxi slowed up and came to a standstill at Friars’ Holm, the quaint old Queen Anne house which Magda had acquired in north London.

Once within the high wall enclosing the old-world garden in which it stood, it was easy enough to imagine oneself a hundred miles from town.  Fir and cedar sentinelled the house, and in the centre of the garden there was a lawn of wonderful old turf, hedged round in summer by a riot of roses so that it gleamed like a great square emerald set in a jewelled frame.

Magda entered the house and, crossing the cheerfully lit hall, threw open the door of a room whence issued the sound of someone—­obviously a first-rate musician—­playing the piano.