She changed colour.
'To Russia! That is very far away!'
'It does not seem so in these days. One sleeps and wakes and sleeps again, and one is there. If you want me in any way, write to me at the Paris house and they will forward your letter. Rosselin will come to see you to-morrow. He will tell you, as no one else can, all you will have to prepare for and encounter if you choose the life of an artist. Do not decide too hastily. There is no hurry. I like best to think of you in these safe pastures.'
'But the winter will come to them and—some time—to me?'
'It is far enough off you, at least, to be forgotten. Well, listen to Rosselin and be guided by your own impulses; they are the only safe guides in such a choice as this. I dare say the world will win you; the world always does. It is only in fable that Herakles goes with Pallas. Adieu.'
She grew very pale, and the light had gone out of her face as it had now gone off the landscape.
'You will come back soon?' she asked.
Othmar resisted a wave of tenderness and pity which passed over him.
'Not very soon,' he answered. 'You know I have many occupations, and the world I warn you against is always with me, alas! I shall never be able to see you often, my dear, for—for—very many reasons; but whenever you really need me, write to me without hesitation, and always depend upon the sincerity of my regard.'
She did not reply. She stood motionless. With the coming of the evening shadows there had came a great chillness, a sense of loss upon her, as if she had been suddenly brought from the warm green meadows of the vale of Chevreuse into the awful silence and whiteness and frozen solitude of a winter's night in Siberia.