"The years like great black oxen tread the world, And God the Herdsman goads them on behind."
That was it....
"Cyprian." Her voice brought him down from the clouds and he closed the window with a slight sense of chill. "Cyprian, look at me."
He raised his eyes to hers, to drop them again immediately.
"Can you tell me, honestly," she asked him, "that you consider it would be what is called a 'sin' for me to lean upon our friendship in the way I choose, to-night?"
He shook his head at that but he would not answer.
"Cyprian, look at me." Nor would he do that again. His eyelids blinked—their old short-sighted trick—over her head, at the sapphire resting against her white throat, at the dying embers, at the hearth-rug where lay, kicked free by its owner, a glass-buckled Cinderella shoe.
And she knew that she would be proved helpless against his refusal so much as to look at his conception of the Forbidden Thing: for every flutter of his eyelids was the drawing of a shutter which blocked from her another window of his soul.
* * * * * *
"And now," said Cyprian at last, his voice dry with exhaustion, "Would you mind going?"