“What have you done to my son?”

“Where is he?” Magda’s answering question came in almost breathless haste.

“You don’t know!”

Lady Raynham sat down suddenly.  Her legs were trembling beneath her—­had been trembling uncontrollably even as she nerved herself to stand and confront the woman at whose door she laid the ruin of her son.  But now the spurt of nervous energy was exhausted, and she sank back into her chair, thankful for its support.

“I don’t know where he is,” she said tonelessly.  “I don’t even know whether he is alive or dead.”

She fumbled in the wrist-bag she carried, and withdrawing a crumpled sheet of notepaper held it out.  Magda took it from her mechanically, recognising, with a queer tightening of the muscles of her throat, the boyish handwriting which sprawled across it.

“You want me to read this?” she asked.

“You’ve got to read it,” replied the other harshly.  “It is written to you.  I found it—­after he’d gone.”

Her gaze fastened on Magda’s face and clung there unwaveringly while she read the letter.

It was a wild, incoherent outpouring—­the headlong confession of a boy’s half-crazed infatuation for a beautiful woman.  A pathetic enough document in its confused medley of passionate demand and boyish humbleness.  The tragic significance of it was summed up in a few lines at the end—­lines which seemed to burn themselves into Magda’s brain: 

“I suppose it was cheek my hoping you could ever care, but you were so sweet to me you made me think you did.  I know now that you don’t—­that you never really cared a brass farthing, and I’m going right away.  The same world can’t hold us both any longer.  So I’m going out of it.”

Magda looked up from the scrawled page and met the gaze of the sad, merciless eyes that were fixed on her.

“Couldn’t you have left him alone?” Lady Raynham spoke in a low, difficult voice.  “You have men enough to pay you compliments and run your errands.  I’d only Kit.  Couldn’t you have let me keep him?  What did you want with my boy’s love.  You’d nothing to give him in return?”

“I had!” protested Magda indignantly.  “You’re wrong.  I was very fond of Kit.  I gave him my friendship.”

Her indignation was perfectly sincere.  To her, it seemed that Lady Raynham was taking up a most unwarrantable attitude.

“Friendship?” repeated the latter with bitter scorn.  “Friendship?  Then God help the boys to whom you give it!  Before Kit ever met you he was the best and dearest son a woman could have had.  He was keen on his work—­wild to get on.  And he was so gifted it looked as if there were nothing in his profession that he might not do. . . .  Then you came!  You turned his head, filled his thoughts to the exclusion of all else—­work, duty, everything that matters to a lad of two-and-twenty.  You spoilt his chances—­spoilt his whole life.  And now I’ve lost him.  I don’t know where he is—­whether he is dead or alive.”  She paused.  “I think he’s dead,” she said dully.