MADAME VICAUD said nothing. She drew her hand from Damier’s and sank again into the chair from which she had risen. Hope, ardor, and love, forever perhaps, were dead within her. She had hated her daughter, but under the hatred had been, always, the hidden flame, not, perhaps, of love, but of longing to love. She hated no longer, and the flame was quenched. Even in his nearness to her, Damier could not look with her at that slain longing. Walking away from her, he stood for a long time, gazing unseeingly over the garden, in silence. At last he turned and came to her. Her arm leaned on the table and her head upon her hand. With unutterable weariness she looked up at him.

“And now,” she said, “you must go, my friend.”

“Go?” Damier repeated.

Years of resolute endurance looked from her eyes; the weariness was not a wavering. Her face seemed sinking back into the abyss from which he had rescued it.

“Yes, you must go.”

“And leave you with her!”

“And leave me with her,” she assented monotonously.

“Never—never!”

She passed her hand over her brow, pressing her eyelids, as if in the effort to dispel her deep fatigue and find words with which to answer his harassing protest.

“Yet you must. I have the wonder, the treasure of your love for me. I will keep it always. I will never forget you. But it is impossible, even the friendship, now. We must not drag what is dear to us in the mire. I could not keep you as my friend under her eyes. I must live with her, and for her; that is the only life possible for me. I made it for myself. Whatever her cruelty, whatever her baseness, I have only to remember that I am responsible for her, that I am her only chance. And after this her presence in my life makes yours wrong. She knows now that you are not a friend only, and as a husband you could not remain. Such a mÉnage À trois would be as detestable as it would be grotesque.”

“She will marry!” cried Damier. “She must marry Monsieur Daunay.”

“I do not think that she will marry him; but if she does marry, I could not separate my life from hers, though then I could see you again, but as friend, as friend only.”

Damier burst out into a smothered invective:

“And you think of sacrificing the rest of your life to that creature—who has no love for you—whom you cannot love! What can you do for her? You can never change or soften her.”

He felt that the vehemence of his despair and rebellion dashed itself against a rocky inflexibility, although she still bent her head upon her hand with the same deep weariness, not looking at him, still spoke on with the same monotonous patience:

“I cannot call the fulfilling of the most rudimentary maternal duty a sacrifice. You forget that my youth is past, and that with it the time for sacrifices is past, too. I have no claims on life. Life, at my age and in my position, can only be a dedication. I can, perhaps, never soften or change her: but I can still protect her; I can still lend her the dignity, such as it is, of my home and my companionship. And I can pity her, most piteous creature—whose mother has no love for her.”

“Ah, you do not love me!” cried Damier, and all his youth was in the cry. “You sacrifice me with such composure! You give yourself to have your life sucked out of you by this vampire shape of the past. And it is me you rob! It is my life you immolate, as well as your own! What of my claim on life—my claim on you? You have no conception of what you are to me, or you could not speak of shutting me out from you; you could not think of sending me away! You could not speak so—think so—if you loved me!”

From her chair she now looked up at him, not with weariness, with a look curiously vivid and tender. “You speak like a boy,” she said.

Damier flung himself on his knees beside her. “And you think that I can leave you when you can look at me like that—love me like that!”

“Because I do.” She let him take her hands, and went on, almost smiling at him: “Because I love you like that, and because you love me like that, and because I am so much older than you—can’t you feel it? how like a little boy—passionate, unruly in his grief—you seem to me! And because, in spite of my age and your boyishness, we do yet love each other so greatly that the very greatness of our love makes the question of our being together or apart really of not such significance.”

“Of not such significance!” poor Damier cried. “I am to find you in heaven, then!”

“Probably.” She did smile now, but he guessed that it was the brave smile she could summon over anguish. He guessed that her feeling of his boyishness was less apparent to her than her feeling of his power over her, his right to her. She might never yield to the power, never own to the right, but to guess that she felt them was assurance enough for the moment, and the pallor of the face that smiled at him was a reproach to him.

“No, no,” he said; “I shall keep you there—and I shall keep you here, too. I will rescue you. I will find out the way. And I will leave you now and give you peace for a little while. You are terribly tired.”

“Terribly,” she assented. “It is kind and generous of you to go now.”

“But my going is to be taken as no token of submission. I will return.”

“To say good-by.”

“So you say.”

“So you will do.” And she still smiled, all tenderness, all inflexibility.

“Never, never, never!” said Damier.