Nina was speaking in a way that surprised Geoffrey. Sorrow had altered her; dangers and changes were encompassing her. Though all love for him was dead, the man whom she had once worshiped stood before her for the last time. He, who had caused her more happiness and distress than any other person ever could again, stood in silence taking his leave of her—forever. Urged by hope, besieged by doubts and dangers, driven by necessities, her mind had acquired an abnormal activity, and she seemed all at once to be able to realize what it was to part from him for all eternity and to become conscious while she stood there of a power to rise in intelligence above everything surrounding her—above all the clogging conditions of our existence—and to judge calmly, even pityingly, of both herself and Geoffrey and of all the agonies and joys that now seemed to have been so small and unnecessary. As she spoke the whole of her life seemed spread out before her. She recollected, or seemed to recollect, all the events of her life, and she remained a moment gazing before her in a way that made her look almost unreal.
"I can see," she said slowly, in a calm, distinct voice, "everything that has happened in my life; but all the rest is all a blank to me."
Geoffrey noticed that, with her clearness of vision into the past, she evidently expected also to see something of the future and was startled and surprised at seeing nothing. She continued looking before her, as if unconscious of his presence, until she turned to him shuddering.
"Good-by, Geoffrey. I feel that something is going to happen in some way, either to you or to me; I don't know how. I see things to-day strangely, and there are other things I want to see and can not."
She looked at him with a look such as he had never seen in any one.
"You will never see me again, Geoffrey. I am certain of that. I pray that God may be as good to you as I have been."
Geoffrey grew pale. Something convinced him that she spoke the truth and that he never would see her again. There was something in her appearance and in her words that made him shudder. A rarefied beauty had spread over her; she seemed to be merely an intelligence, speaking from the purity of some other realm. It seemed as if it were no human prompting that urged her to the utterance of forebodings, and that her last words were as sweet as they were terrible.
He tried to look at her kindly, to cheer her, but he saw that, for the moment, the emotions of our ordinary life were totally apart from her and that he had become nothing to her but a combination of recollections.
He raised her hand to his lips, took a long look at her, and went his way, leaving her standing in the middle of the room calmly watching his retreat.
As Hampstead went back to the club he felt unstrung. He went in and drank several glasses of brandy to brace himself. He had been drinking a great deal during this excitement over his investments. At ordinary times he did not care enough about liquor to try to make a pastime of drinking. Now, there was a fever in his blood that seemed to demand a still greater fever. He did not get drunk, because his individuality seemed to assert itself over and above all he consumed. To-day, to add to the depression he felt about his prospects (for ruin was staring him in the face), the strange words of Nina—full of presentiment—her uncanny, prophetess-like eyes, and the conviction that he had seen her for the last time—all weighed upon him. Her last words to him haunted him, and he drank heavily all the evening.