"Then you do know?" he said in a broken, husky voice.
"Yes, I know," she replied like a faint echo.
He did not make any attempt either to reason with her or to go; he merely sat there in utter dejection, this man of the world and its affairs, whom women had these many years called callous.
When at last he pulled himself from the chair, he held out both his hands, but did not go toward Poppea.
"Then it is good-by?" he questioned.
"I'm afraid it must be," she replied, touched by a profound sadness, "but oh, I do wish for my own sake it need not be, for in spite of everything I am so very lonely." Then of her own accord she took his hands and looked into his face, but in her eyes there shone something that checked the parting kiss that he intended. If she were born for love, she was no less fashioned for fidelity even to an idea, and Winslow saw that young as she was and whether she realized it or not, he had come into her life too late.
John Angus, sitting alone on his piazza, had at first listened in irritation to the voice below in the garden, then the very quality of its tone brought back the past as a surging tide that he could not check. Once more he was at the open-air fête of a foreign city and the singing of a lovely girl, little more than a child, had crept into his heart, as her exquisite form and coloring had pleased his critical eye, and he had let himself go. Then to keep the time schedule he had arranged between himself and certain inexorable ambitions, he had suddenly pulled the chain brutally taut, and among those that it had cruelly bruised, must he not at last count himself?
What if he had not—but what was the use. The singing ceased and with it his unusual revery. Shivering at the touch of the dew on the arm of his chair, he went indoors, closing the long porch window after him, and after wandering listlessly through the lower rooms for a while, climbed slowly up to his own chamber in the same wing with Philip's rooms, where he sat reading, and so seemed less lonely. For of late, without spoken words having passed between, Philip was becoming more and more estranged from his father, and sought his room or went to the studio as soon as might be after meals, until John Angus began to wonder, with a half-physical, half-emotional belief in the supernatural, if it were possible that Philip knew the policy of the will that he had made, by a form of second sight.
This thought was uppermost as he entered his private room, and after lighting the four lamps that it held, closed and locked the door. He would read the will over once more after he was comfortably fixed in bed. He could not understand why in July the air should be so cold, yet as fresh air was his chief necessity, he could not close the windows. Turning to ring for his valet, that he might light the wood fire that was laid ready at all seasons, he changed his mind and put a match to it himself. Drawing a chair before the blaze, that under ordinary conditions he would have deemed suffocating, he chafed and warmed his hands. This done, he slowly set about undressing.