“Well?” she repeated. “What do you want? To know the result of your handiwork?”—bitterly. “You’ve been quite as successful as even you could have wished.”
“Don’t,” he said unevenly. “Magda, I can’t bear it. You can’t give up—all this. Your dancing—it’s your life! I shall never forgive myself . . . I’ll see Quarrington and tell him—”
“You can’t see him. He’s gone away.”
“Then I’ll find him.”
“If you found him, nothing you could say would make any difference,” she answered unemotionally. “It’s the facts that matter. You can’t alter—facts.”
Davilof made a gesture of despair.
“Is it true you’re going into some sisterhood?” he asked hoarsely.
“Yes.”
“And it is I—I who have driven you to this! Dieu! I’ve been mad—mad!”
His hands were clenched, his face working painfully. The hazel eyes—those poet’s eyes of his which she had seen sometimes soft with dreams and sometimes blazing with love’s fire—were blurred by misery. They reminded her of the contrite, tortured eyes of a dog which, maddened by pain, has bitten the hand of a beloved master. Her anger died away in the face of that overwhelming remorse. She herself had learned to know the illimitable bitterness of self-reproach.