She drew a long breath, went over to the dressing-table and rearranged her hair which, at the moment when she had thrown herself at his feet, had become disarranged. She took her time, adjusting many little trifles, assuring herself that all trace of her emotion had disappeared. When she returned to where he had waited motionless, she said:
“I’m sorry. It’s all very foolish. You are ruining yourself.” He took up her coat and held it for her. “I shan’t trouble you again,” she continued. “It is final, isn’t it?”
He opened the door, aware of the hammering at his heart and the dangerous tension of all his nerves.
“Too late—I’ve said it—you’ve got just four days more.”
“I’ve been a fool. It is useless to ask you to forgive me. I do, though,” she said bitterly enough, yet to him the motion seemed counterfeit.
He laughed a scornful laugh.
“With all your cleverness you’re not clever enough. You should have known the man you’re dealing with.”
The next moment they were in the hall, and he perceived that they had been overheard.
The rest is known; her attempt to lure him downstairs to where Doctor Fortier and his aides were waiting (an attempt frustrated by the intuition of Inga and the interference of O’Leary); Dangerfield’s alarm at the menace he felt about him; his enforced abstinence, and the obsession that gradually took possesion of him that he was being watched, an obsession which was justified by the subsequent attempt which nearly succeeded in delivering him into the hands of Doctor Fortier. The constant thought of the outer danger raised up in his soul the fear of the inner thing, that something worse than death which, at times, in his physical weakness seemed to cry out in the hollow of his brain. When he had whispered to Inga the thing he feared, he had but hinted at the inner torment through which he was passing. To hold on to himself a little longer, to realize the vengeance he had determined was his sole engrossing thought, and then, one way or the other, to pull the numbing clouds of oblivion about his head and sink out of sight—a failure. For he had reached that utterly hopeless point in the life of a man of talent when he has seen everything, been everything, hoped everything, and come to utter disillusionment, too profound in artistic vision to trick himself into vain hopes, too keen in worldly knowledge not to perceive the tragedy of what might have been. Had the wreck of his home come before the surrender of his vision, he would have reacted, forgotten all in the return to untrammeled simplicity and dedication to work. The contrary was true, and, in the whole world, there was nothing to fall back on—no object, and no living person. With Inga, he felt strange actions and reactions. In her presence, the quiet, unquestioning devotion of her personality roused him sometimes to moments of vain regret. He had even said to himself that such a personality, absolutely devoted, demanding nothing but to serve him, unflinching in her loyalty, would have been the companion he craved and needed. He often thought bitterly that it was the final irony of fate that, in the end, in such an abandoned corner of the world, he should have found her—too late.