For a moment he did not answer. Then he said, his voice not quite under control "You expect me to decide that for you? My dear, you ask too much."
He took his hat and left; but Joan knew that he had decided.
They walked up and down the quai for an hour or so before the gangway was drawn in. Joan always afterwards remembered what they said, as one recalls the least syllable of the dying. There was a sense of finality about this parting, against which she struggled in vain.
She filled her eyes with him as if she had never seen him before, and would not again. She noted little physical details which had hitherto escaped her—the fine cameo cutting of his features, the long, sensitive, expressive hands, the air he shared with many Europeans of belonging to an older, more finished race than her own. In his calm impassivity there was a suggestion of Slavic fatalism, combined with the tragic patience of the Jew. Only his eyes smoldered with an unquenchable spark that flamed to hers.
She knew that the Romance which had always eluded her was here at her side, in the person of this perfect comrade, this shadowy, insistent influence in her life which was about to withdraw into the shadows again. Perhaps she understood, too, that Romance to remain Romance must be elusive. Seized and held, it changes into something else. Yet she tried to cling to it.
"You will be right here waiting on this spot when I come back, won't you, Stefan?—For I will come back," she exclaimed as he did not answer. "Say that you know I will!"
"I know that you will do whatever seems to you right."
She made a mutinous face at him. "That's more than I know! I'm much more likely to do whatever seems to me nice—Oh, Stefan, why will you persist in believing in me always, no matter how badly I behave?" Lightly as she spoke, her eyes were fixed on him, telling him consciously what her lips could not utter.
He answered at one of his usual tangents. "Do you not know that every splinter of a genuine Cremona violin vibrates to the bow on as true a tone as did the unbroken instrument?"