Her head thrown wearily against the chair-back, she shook it dully.
“I told you before that I didn’t know, Vittorio.”
He mused down upon her darkly.
“Then it is even worse than I feared. If you had loved him, a certain rapture might have repaid the sacrifice. But if it is only pity! Why, Anne, if it is merely pity, why don’t you take it out on me? Surely, I deserve it after all these years. Am I not equally an object for charity?”
He knelt beside the chair and grasped her hands.
“Ah, but you are a man, Vittorio. Able to stand upon your own feet. He is only a sick boy, an artist, whose art, his only reason for living, had deserted him until only the other day. And I—I seem to be able to help. If I stay by him, it may never leave him again.”
He dropped her hands and rose. His face took on a hard expression, utterly foreign to him. He laughed shortly.
“I see he has appealed to the maternal, the protective instinct. He is clever, if weak. But is the game worth the candle?”
She sighed, and spread her hands in a weary, undecided gesture.
“Is any game worth the candle, Vittorio, if you weigh the wax? But if I can help him to get on his feet again, if I can bring his art back again, I shall feel as if I had been of some use in the world at last.”