“But it may be a girl.”
She smiled again, bitterly, and said, “Oh, no! I am certain it will be a boy. You have a genius for success, my dear. You were never a bad gambler. I’m certain you will not fail old Thérèse.”
At the door it was Victorine (who had been waiting in the shadows) who opened for them. The two Mrs. Callendars said good-by.
“There is only one thing ...” said Sabine. “I wonder whether he is really worth all this trouble and anxiety. When one thinks of the matter coldly, there is nothing to commend him. He has no virtues either as a husband or a lover. Sometimes I think him merely a stupid animal with immense powers of attraction.”
“But none of that makes any difference,” said Ellen. “That’s the queer thing! It never does.”
She watched Sabine until she saw her disappear into the tiny motor whose lights made two bright sparks in the spring darkness, and when she returned to the sitting room she knew suddenly that she had left Callendar for good. There was no longer any doubt about it. If she had not, in her heart, thought of him as a part of the past, she could not have talked as she did with Sabine. And Sabine had been right in knowing that there was something which she had concealed. It was this—that in the months spent in the Tunisian villa there had been moments when she fancied that her eyes were taking on the dumb, pleading look which had always been in the near-sighted eyes of Clarence. The memory came back to her now across all the years. He had beseeched her with his eyes for all that she could not give him, pled with her not to escape forever from his life. And what was his poor, pale love in comparison with this wild, devouring emotion that sometimes took possession of her? For Clarence was not dead yet; he still had the power of returning to her. The past, which she had tried always to forget, arose again and again. She even wondered sometimes what had become of poor, forlorn Mr. Wyck and those other figures, so dim now that they seemed to belong to some earlier life. She could see Clarence once more ... his pale, tormented eyes, his dumb adoration. It seemed to her that it was this adoration, this abasement which had been the essence of his whole existence.
No, she could not face such a thing!
Hansi, lying by the fire, watched her with his gold eyes while she paced up and down in wild agitation.
It was intolerable, loathsome, impossible that she should ever become possessed ... possessed as Clarence had once been. She had been free always and it was too late now to change.
She had dinner alone in the same room where she had talked with Sabine, and when she had finished she sent for Victorine and told her that she was leaving the house. If there were any messages (for she knew well enough that there would be, perhaps cable after cable) they could be forwarded to the Rue Raynouard where she would be with Madame de Cyon. She was returning now to Lily, as she had done so many times before.