“You don’t understand at all,” he said impatiently. “What would you do if you knew, absolutely knew, that everything was over, that all you had hoped for was impossible, that everything you had been striving for—that nothing was to come of it, nothing—no more illusions, no more dreams.” The last words seemed to stick in his mind, for presently he began to grow more excited. “It’s the dreaming that’s the best of all; and when that’s gone—when you can’t lie back at night and dream to yourself of doing something so great that the whole world comes crowding in to stare at it—a ‘Mona Lisa’ or a ‘Spring’ of Botticelli or——” He ended abruptly, with a curious sound that was not quite a laugh but more a bitter protest. “No, no—no more dreams, no more.”
On the other side of the wall the dancing had ended. With the approach of the weakening hour when the old year would yield its last breath, the company began to sing old-fashioned ballads—“Kathleen Mavourneen” and “The Lass o’ Lowrie.” He seemed suddenly to realize all that he had been revealing of the rebellion in his soul, for he turned toward her in a sudden antagonism.
“Here, I don’t like your sitting there making me talk!”
“I’m not making you,” she said. “It’s you who wanted me to be by you to-night.”
“That’s so,” he assented. He turned toward her with another touch of that shrewd, half-smiling cunning which he had shown when he had thought to frighten her before. “If you only knew——”
“That’s just what I don’t want,” she said quickly. “I don’t want to know.”
“Really?” he said, drawing back to watch her.
“It isn’t necessary.”
This answer seemed to satisfy him, for he forgot her presently, returning to the contemplation of the city below them.
“I suppose it’s almost time,” he said. “The whistles will be blowing soon.”