Only—­he was not really quite a stranger!  He was the “Saint Michel” of her childhood days, the man with whom she had unconsciously compared those other men whom the passing years had brought into her life—­and always to their disadvantage.

The first time she had seen him in the woods at Coverdale was the day when Hugh Vallincourt had beaten her; she had been smarting with the physical pain and humiliation of it.  And now, this second time they had met, she had been once more forced to endure that strange and unaccustomed experience called pain.  Only this time she felt as though her soul had been beaten, and it was Saint Michel himself who had scourged her.

The door at the far end of the room opened suddenly and a welcome voice broke cheerfully across the bitter current of her thoughts.

“Well, here I am at last!  Has Magda arrived home yet?”

Davilof ceased playing abruptly and the speaker paused on the threshold of the room, peering into the dusk.  Magda rose from her seat by the fire and switched on one of the electric burners.

“Yes, here I am,” she said.  “Did you get held up by the fog, Gillian?”

The newcomer advanced into the circle of light.  She was a small, slight woman, though the furs she was wearing served to conceal the slenderness of her figure.  Someone had once said of her that “Mrs. Grey was a charming study in sepia.”  The description was not inapt.  Eyes and hair were brown as a beechnut, and a scattering of golden-brown freckles emphasised the warm tints of a skin as soft as velvet.

“Did I get held up?” she repeated.  “My dear, I walked miles—­miles, I tell you!—­in that hideous fog.  And then found I’d been walking entirely in the wrong direction!  I fetched up somewhere down Notting Hill Gate way, and at last by the help of heaven and a policeman discovered the Tube station.  So here I am.  But if I could have come across a taxi I’d have been ready to buy it, I was so tired!”

“Poor dear!” Magda was duly sympathetic.  “We’ll have some tea.  You’ll stay, Davilof?”

“I think not, thanks.  I’m dining out”—­with a glance at his watch.  “And I shan’t have too much time to get home and change as it is.”

Magda held out her hand.

“Good-bye, then.  Thank you for keeping me company till Gillian came.”

There was a sudden sweetness of gratitude in the glance she threw at him which fired his blood.  He caught her hand and carried it to his lips.

“The thanks are mine,” he said in a stifled voice.  And swinging round on his heel he left the room abruptly, quite omitting to make his farewells to Mrs. Grey.

The latter looked across at Magda with a gleam of mirth in her brown eyes.  Then she shook her head reprovingly.

“Will you never learn wisdom, Magda?” she asked, subsiding into a chair and extending a pair of neatly shod feet to the fire’s warmth.