"As you please."
"You are, for some reason, trying to drive away my friendship. Your pride in your own self-sufficience——"
"You force me to be perfectly frank," he interrupted. "My love for you is nothing but a passion. It has been tempting me to play the traitor to myself. I caught myself in time. I stand or fall alone. You would merely burden and weaken me."
She sat still and white and cold. Without looking at her, he, in a stolid, emotionless way, and with a deliberation that seemed to have no reluctance in it, left her alone.
"Horace!" she cried, starting up, as the portière dropped behind him.
The only answer was the click of the closing outside door. She sank back, stared in a stupor at the shrine which the god had visited after so many years—had visited only to profane and destroy.
XXIV
NEVA SOLVES A RIDDLE
Next morning she sent Boris a note asking him not to come until afternoon. When he entered the studio he found her before the blazing logs in the big fireplace, weary, depressed, bearing the unbecoming signs of a sleepless night and a day crouched down in the house. "We must go and walk this off," said he.
"No," replied she listlessly. "Nothing could induce me to dress."