She scarcely knew how it was that she first began to know the sound of his foot upon the stairway and to listen for it. Her earliest consciousness of it was when once she awakened suddenly out of a dead sleep at night and found herself sitting upright with her hand upon her heavily throbbing heart.
“What is it?” she cried in a loud whisper. But she spoke only to herself and the darkness. She knew what it was and did not lie down again until the footsteps had reached the top of the last flight and the door above had opened and closed.
The time arrived when there was scarcely a trifling incident in his everyday life which escaped her. She saw each sign of his poverty and physical weakness. He grew paler day by day. There were days when his step flagged as he went up and down the staircase; some mornings he did not go out at all. She discovered that each Sunday he went twice to the little American chapel in the Rue de Berri, and she had seen in his room a small Protestant Bible.
“You read that?” she asked him when she first saw it.
“Yes.”
She leaned forward, her look curious, bewildered, even awed.
“And you believe in—God?”
“Yes.”
She resumed her former position, but she did not remove her eyes from his face, and unconsciously she put her hand up to her swelling throat.
When at length the sitting was over and she left her chair he was standing before the easel. He turned to her and spoke hesitantly.