Something faded from his face. He looked at her fixedly for a moment and then rose to his feet. "I wonder if you've fooled yourself as thoroughly as you have me," he said.
She made no reply, though she cringed slightly at the inference, and sat there watching him.
He lifted his shoulders and let them sink heavily, and then he cast a look about the deserted lobby. Then he turned to her again and imperceptibly inclined his head. He did not offer his hand.
"Good-bye," he said.
"Good-bye," she echoed, her lips barely moving.
She watched his broad, stolid back move slowly across the room, saw him pause for a moment at the door and then plunge resolutely through it, and then she was alone. Not a sound came to her ears. The desk by the switchboard was deserted. A bracket lamp on the wall opposite was crooked; one of the crystal pendants beneath it was broken short off. Someone had dropped a burnt match on the floor in front of the desk and it lay there in mute sacrilege. All at once the silence seemed fraught with a tumult of hateful suggestions, and, without ringing for the elevator, she sprang to her feet, rushed for the steps, and fled up to her room.
She switched on the light and stood for a moment by the table fingering an ivory paper cutter. Then she went to the window and peered out. Not a sound came to her, not a single, friendly sound. Below her the leafy branches stretched out, inert, indifferent; and below them, darkness.
"And this is the man," she thought, "from whom I have borrowed all that money."