"You have done what you could for me," he said. "You've made me hate my inferno. But you can't pull me out. You have"—she saw his teeth for a second though scarcely in a smile—"other fish to fry."
"Whatever I am doing, I shall not forget my friends, Nap," she said, with great earnestness.
"No," he returned, "you won't forget them. I shouldn't wonder if you prayed for them even. I am sure you are one of the faithful." There was more of suppressed misery than irony in his voice. "But is that likely to help when you don't so much as know what to pray for?"
He got up and moved away from her with that noiseless footfall that was so like the stealthy padding of a beast.
Anne lay and silently watched him. Her uncertainty regarding him had long since passed away. Though she was far from understanding him, he had become an intimate friend, and she treated him as such. True, he was unlike any other man she had ever met, but that fact had ceased to embarrass her. She accepted him as he was.
He came back at length and sat down, smiling at her, though somewhat grimly.
"You will pardon your poor jester," he said, "if he fails to make a joke on your last night. He could make jokes—plenty of them, but not of the sort that would please you."
Anne said nothing. She would not, if she could help it, betray to any how much she was dreading the morrow. But she felt that he knew it in spite of her.
His next words revealed the fact. "You are going to purgatory," he said, "and I am going to perdition. Do you know, I sometimes wonder if we shouldn't do better to turn and fly in the face of the gods when they drive us too hard? Why do we give in when we've nothing to gain and all to lose?"
She met his look with her steadfast eyes. "Does duty count as nothing?" she said.