"Yes, yes," he said, hoarsely, almost inarticulately, "let us go home. Let us——."
She took his hand, drew his arm through hers, and led him down the stairs. He went with the docility, the helplessness of a child, and sank into a corner of the cab with his eyes dull and lifeless, but his lips still moving.
Presently he beckoned to her. "What—what did he say?" he asked tremulously, his face working.
"It—it does not matter what he said, dear," she said soothingly. "Do not think of it. Try to forget it! Lean against me, dear!"
But he put her from him, not with his old impatient irritability, but with a gentleness that was quite new with him; and lying back in the cab stared at the floor, his lips moving, and Leslie could hear him still repeating the words they had heard from Mr. Arnheim.
It seemed an age before the cab reached Torrington Square, and when it did so the man Leslie helped out was an older man by twenty years than he who had left it that morning.
She helped him up to his room and tried to cheer and comfort him; but, for the first time in her life, her loving flattery proved of no avail.
He listened with vacant eyes and wan, hopeless face, and at last, he suddenly flung his hands before his eyes and uttered a low cry of despair, and awakening.
"God help me!" he cried. "I am a fraud and a lie! I see it all, now. A fraud and a lie! The man was right; I cannot paint!" He caught up a canvas that lay against the wall, and gazed at it. "It is a hideous daub, as he said. It is the work of a madman. I have been mad. Oh, God, if I could have remained so."
"My dear, my dear!" she murmured, kneeling beside him and gently drawing the picture from his weak, trembling hands. "Don't think of what—what he said."