"What?" She stood still and looked up at him. "Just go?" "Of course. It was what you did when you ran away to Lucerne. If you'd suggested you'd never have got there. And you did that for merest fun. While this--" He looked at her, and the impishness died out of his face. "Why, this," he said, after a silence, "this is the giving back to me of my soul. I need you, my dear. I need you as a dark room needs a lamp, as a cold room needs a fire. My work will be nothing without you--how can it be with no light to see by? It will be empty, dead. It will be like the sky without the star that makes it beautiful, the hay without the flower that scents it, the cloak one is given by God to keep out the cold and wickedness of life slipped off because there was no clasp to hold it tight over one's heart." She began to warm again. She had been a little cooled while he laughed by himself over Lady Missenden's unregretted journeyings. To go to Italy; to go to Italy at all; but to go under such conditions, wanted, indispensable to the creation of a great work of art; it was the most amazing cluster of joys surely that had ever been offered to woman. "How long would I have to be away?" she asked. "How long is the shortest time one wants for a picture?" He airily told her a month would be enough, and, on her exclaiming, immediately reduced it to a week. "But getting there and coming back--" "Well, say ten days," he said. "Surely you could get away for ten days? To do," he added, looking at her, "some long-delayed shopping in Berlin." "But I don't want to shop." "Oh, Ingeborg, you're relapsing into your choir-boy condition again. Of course you don't want to shop. Of course you don't want to go to Berlin. But it's what you'll say to Robert." "Oh?" she said. "But isn't that--wouldn't that be rather--" "Why can't you be as simple as when you went to Lucerne? You wanted to go, so you went. And you were leaving your father who tremendously needed you. You were his right hand. Here you're nobody's right hand. I'm not asking you to do anything that would hurt Robert. All you've got to do is to arrange so that he knows nothing beyond Berlin. Surely after these years he can let you go away for ten days?" She walked with him in silence down the lilac path as far as the gate into the yard. She was exalted, but her exaltation was shot with doubt. What he said sounded so entirely right, so obviously right. She had no reasoning to put up against it. She longed intolerably to go. She was quite certain it was a high and beautiful thing to go. And yet-- Herr Dremmel's laboratory windows were open, for the evening was heavy and quiet, and they could see him in the lamplight, with disregarded moths fluttering round his head, bent over his work. "Good night," Ingram called in at the window with the peculiar cordial voice reserved for husbands; but Herr Dremmel was too much engrossed to hear.