"You are painting her portrait?"
"Yes."
"That will be interesting. I'd like to see how it's done. I'll sit by quite quietly. You won't mind me."
"I'm afraid you'll have to go," replied the painter. "I'd not be disturbed, but a spectator has a disastrous effect on the sitter."
"I see," said Armstrong. "Well, I'll wait until she comes. Are you just beginning?"
"No," replied Raphael curtly.
"Is that the portrait?" asked Armstrong, indicating the covered canvas.
Boris hesitated, suddenly flung off the cover.
"Ah!" exclaimed Armstrong, under his breath, drawing back a step.
He gazed with an expression that interested Boris the lover even more than Boris the student and painter of human nature. Since the talk with Atwater, Armstrong had been casting this way and that, night and day, for some means, any means, to escape from the sentence the grandee of finance had fixed upon him; for he had not even considered the alternative—to strike his flag in surrender. But escape he could not contrive, and it had pressed in upon him that he must go down, down to the bottom. He might drag many with him, perhaps Atwater himself; but, in the depths, under the whole mass of wreckage would be himself—dead beyond resurrection. At thirty a man's reputation can be shot all to pieces, and heal, with hardly a scar; but not at forty. Still young, with less than half his strength of manhood run, he would be of the living that are dead. And he had come to see Neva for the last time, after fighting in vain against the folly of the longing—of yielding to the longing, when yielding could mean only pain, more pain.