“I’m sorry if—­”

“Sorry!” Lady Raynham interrupted hysterically.  Her composure was giving way under the strain of the interview.  “Sorry if my son has taken his own life—­”

“He hasn’t,” asserted Magda desperately.  “He was far too sensible and—­and ordinary.”

“Yes.  Till you turned his head!”

Lady Raynham rose and walked towards the door as though she had said all she came to say.  Magda sprang to her feet.

“I won’t—­I won’t be blamed like this!” she exclaimed rebelliously.  “It’s unfair!  Can I help it if your son chose to fall in love with me?  You—­you might as well hold me responsible because he is tall or short—­or good or bad!”

The other stopped suddenly on her way to the door as though arrested by that last defiant phrase.

“I do,” she said sternly.  “It’s women like you who are responsible whether men are good—­or bad.”

In silence Magda watched the small, unassuming figure disappear through the doorway.  She felt powerless to frame a reply, nor had Lady Raynham waited for one.  If her boy were indeed dead—­dead by his own hand—­she had at least cleared his memory, laid the burden of the mad, rash act he had committed on the shoulders that deserved to bear it.

Normally a shy, retiring kind of woman, loathing anything in the nature of a scene, the tragedy which had befallen her son had inspired Alicia Raynham with the reckless courage of a tigress defending its young.  And now that the strain was over and she found herself once more in her brougham, driving homeward with the familiar clip-clop of the fat old carriage-horse’s hoofs in her ears, she shrank back against the cushions marvelling at the temerity which had swept her into the Wielitzska’s presence and endowed her with words that cut like a two-edged sword.

Like a two-edged sword in very truth!  Lady Raynham’s final thrust, stabbing at her with its stern denunciation, brought back vividly to Magda Michael Quarrington’s bitter speech—­“I’ve no place for your kind of woman.”

Side by side with the recollection came a sudden dart of fear.  How would all this stir about Kit Raynham—­the impending gossip and censure which seemed likely to be accorded her—­affect him?  Would he judge her again—­as he had judged her before?

She was conscious of a fresh impulse of anger against Lady Raynham.  She wanted to forget the past—­blot it all out of her memory—­and out of the memory of the man whose contempt had hurt her more than anything in her whole life before.  And now it seemed as though everything were combining to emphasise those very things which had earned his scorn.

But, apart from a certain apprehension as to how the whole affair might appear in Michael’s eyes, she was characteristically unimpressed by her interview with Lady Raynham.

“I don’t see,” she told Gillian indignantly, “that I’m to blame because the boy lost his head.  His mother was—­stupid.”