"Nina," he said, calling her again that which in all the fervor of his nomenclature during the passionate, passed-by period he had so often voiced. "Nina, I've come to ask a great kindness at your hands—two, in fact."
She sat quiet, staring at him with those lash-veiled eyes that had driven him and so many, many others not quite mad; and, had the lesson he had spent months conning in such a hell as may exist amid our earthly surroundings been a bit less bitter and thorough, he must have felt that near-madness course in his veins again. But he was seared so that no near-madness was for him any more.
"How you've changed!" she observed, not seeming to notice his speech, and speaking herself in a certain tone of absolute childlike wonder, which was not the least of the weapons in her arsenal of personal persuasion. "Why, you've lines across your forehead—at your age, too! Lines that I can see even from here."
"Never mind," he said; and then some impulse led him to go over and kneel beside her, conscious only of an acute wonder as to what would come next. "Never mind, dear girl, listen to me."
She put her hand upon his head. "And white hairs," she pursued, tracing them with an astonished finger. "At your age, too. One—five. Why, I can count eight."
"Never mind," he repeated, pulling down the impertinent finger and wondering as he did so that its fresh imprisonment left him so pitifully, piteously unthrilled. "Never mind—I don't care what I look like any more.
"It's all so futile—life is so empty—things seem to me so very, very trivial. What are wrinkles beside things—untellable things—that stone one's immortality and make one wish that on the Judgment Day God Himself wouldn't know!"
Even as he spoke he caught himself questioning whether she believed him—whether his words stirred any feeling in her.
She dropped her eyes and pulled her hand free.
"I know what you mean," she said in a toneless voice. "I had such secrets, too. But they're not what people fancy them to be. People think I killed my husband; but I didn't. I did what you've done—what we all do. I killed myself."