In the dining room the servants moved noiselessly, as though fearful of disturbing the long silences. A sickly breeze stirred the curtains of apricot velvet. The brass band in Washington Square was playing selections from Verdi; the long-drawn wails of the horns crept in through the windows like snatches of a dirge. She was reduced to speaking of the sultry air. A thunderstorm was brewing? "The air will be clearer," he assented. He ate nothing. When Hamoud had wheeled him back to the drawing-room, he asked: "Do you mind if I go? A splitting headache. This weather." "You shouldn't have stayed in town, you see," she returned automatically. "Maybe I'll go up to Westchester for a week or so." His dull eyes rested upon the picture that she made as she stood uneasily before him, with an appearance of guilt, her figure like a shaft of flame springing upward from the hearth, her brown head aureoled by the tempestuous canvas of Bronzino. "Besides," he concluded, "keeping you here all this while a prisoner----" "How can you be so unkind?" "At least I'm not ungrateful." He made a sign to Hamoud, who stole forward to take his post behind the wheel chair; and the two faces regarded her with the same brave, secret look, the same queer impassiveness that was like a deafening cry. Her nerves began to fail her. With an unaccountable feeling of perfidy she straightened his cravat, while murmuring: "I'll see you first, of course, dear?" "Of course." But he neither saw her nor telephoned before his departure; nor did he write to her from the house in Westchester County. On the third day she went to Brantome, who said: "I was coming to see you." Fixing her with his tragical old eyes, he informed her that he had received a long-distance call from David Verne's physician, who had telephoned from the house in Westchester County. In three days David seemed to have lost all that he had gained in these months. For some reason he was letting go of life. "Why is that? Is it because he is letting go of you?" The Frenchman's leonine countenance took on a hostile expression. He persisted: "Eh? Is it you who have done this?" And Lilla understood that to this old devotee of the arts she had ceased to be anything except a means to an end. He seemed contemptible to her with his red-rimmed, fiery eyes, his Viking mustaches that had turned truculent, his whole aspect of animosity at this last collapse of hope. And of a sudden she divined the true basis of those hopes of his--the longing for at least some vicarious creation, the desire to escape, in part, his own sense of defeat by aiding, and, therefore, sharing, the triumphs of another. He put himself in her path: he would not let her go. He was preparing to hurl at her, who knew what reproaches. "Oh, get out of my way!" she cried at last, in a breaking voice. She pushed him aside so sharply that he tottered back on his heels. She rushed out of the room, downstairs, into her car.