At sight of her there arose a rapturous shout of delight.
“Natalie! Natalie! Welcome!”
But instantaneously it died away. One second she stood there, brilliant, smiling, defiant. The next, they saw that a mysterious change had seized upon her. She had become deathly white, and was waving them from her with a wild gesture.
“I am not coming,” she cried, breathlessly. “No! No! No!”
And the next instant they could only gaze at each others’ terror-stricken faces, at the place she had left vacant,—for she was gone.
She went up the stairs blindly and uncertainly. When she reached the turn of the fourth floor where the staircase was bare and unlighted, she staggered and sank against the balustrades, her face upturned.
“I cannot go back,” she whispered to the darkness and silence above. “Do you hear? I cannot! And it is you—you who restrain me!”
But there were no traces of her passion in her face when she went to the little studio the next day as usual. When the artist opened the door for her, it struck him that she was calm even to coldness.
Instead of sitting down, she went to the easel and stood before it.
“Monsieur,” she said, “I have discovered where your mistake lies. You have tried to paint what you fancied must once have existed, though it exists no longer. That is your mistake. It has never existed at all. I remember no youth, no childhood. Life began for me as it will end. It was my fate that it should. I was born in the lowest quarter of Paris. I knew only poverty, brutality, and crime. My beauty simply raised me beyond their power. Where should I gain what you have insisted in bestowing upon me?”