“Well, I have often thought I was in love. But it soon passed. It always passes.”
She shook her head and smiled.
Immediately after dinner she disappeared.
The night was ghostly with a swollen moon. Looking from my bedroom window at about ten o’clock I saw white buildings with ink-black shadows. The streets were almost deserted. Somebody out there was singing a restless song, and the restlessness of the music awakened in me an almost insufferable pain—an ache—a dark turbulence of the spirit. I felt my heart beating wildly, and in my soul there was a deep desire to scatter myself on the night. What was the matter? Was I in love once more? And if so, with what?—with whom?... When one asks questions of this kind, one already knows the answers; nevertheless, one does not stop asking those questions. I was in love with her.
I left my room and sought her vainly in the lounge and in the drawing-room. Then I went to the deserted entrance-hall and thence to the open door. On the top step Lovelace was standing irresolutely, his hat on. I stepped up to him.
“Don’t go!” I said in a low voice.
It was a random shot, but it hit the mark.
“I don’t wish to,” he said, “but she draws and pulls.”
He was trembling violently.
“I thought of visiting the Acropolis,” I said, though indeed I had no such thought.