The boy looked at her with a terrible look in his eyes—pitiful, baffled, imploring, delirious.
‘Nadine, Nadine,’ he whispered hoarsely, ‘will you send me away like that—to die?’
But she had passed, with her slow soft grace, into the adjoining room. He heard her say to Melville, who had been asked there:
‘You are after my hours, Monsignore, but you are always welcome.’
Seliedoff, with a mist like blood before his eyes, staggered out of the little salon into the mild primrose-scented evening air, hearing, as in a dream, the voices of the servants who told him that his horses waited.
‘She will never forgive; she will never forgive,’ he thought, with a sickening sense that this one moment of insanity had severed him for ever from the woman he worshipped. ‘She will never forgive; I shall never enter her house again!’
All the lovely scene stretching before him in its peace and luxuriance, as the stars came out in the deep blue skies and the daylight still lingered upon shore and sea, was blotted out for him by a red haze as of blood and of tears.