Upon Blizzard, who had been looking forward to many mornings during which he should unobtrusively advance his cause, this quiet statement fell with disturbing force. It meant that his opportunities for intimate talks had come to a sudden and most unprepared-for end. He knew that Barbara was tired out with the steady grind of creation, and that she had been going through an equally steady grind of discouragement and uncertainty. He believed that she would make no delay in carrying her triumph and her trouble out of the heat-ridden city, to cool places, to her own people. He believed, not that she would forget him, but that, free from his influence, she would see with equal vision how wide the gulf between them really was. He had made a slip in his calculation. He had been spreading his arts thinly, you may say, to cover what he supposed was to have been a much longer period of time. And he should have come sooner and with all his strength to the point. There had been moments of supreme discouragement, when, if there was to be a miracle in his life, he should have spoken. There were to be no more of those golden moments. She would close the studio, go away, and return by way of exercise and fresh air to a sane and normal state of mind--a state of mind in which such a physical and moral cripple as himself could have no place except among the curiosities. She stood looking steadily at the head which had come to life under her hands. Her eyelids drooped heavily. She looked almost as if she was falling asleep. Blizzard watched her as a cat watches a mouse, not knowing what was best for him to dare. Now he was for pleading his cause with all the passion that inspired it; now for boldly claiming her as the expiation for her father's fault; and now he was for passing over all preliminaries and felling her with a blow of his fist. And then she suddenly turned to him, and smiled like a very happy and very tired child. "You've been very good to me," she said, "and so patient! I don't know quite how to thank you. I owe you such a lot." "Do you?" he said, his hard eyes softening and seeking hers. She nodded slowly. "Such a lot. And there's no way of paying, or making things up to you, is there?" "Only one," he said. There was quite a long silence; his eyes, flames in them, held hers, which were troubled and childlike, and imbued the two words that he had spoken with an unmistakable intelligence. "Don't let me go utterly," he said, "and slip back into the pit. You have finished the bust. If you wished you could finish the man: put him back among the good angels.... If your father died owing money, you couldn't rest until you had paid his debts.... I could be anything you wished. And I could give you anything that you wanted in this world. There is nothing I couldn't put over--with you at my side, wishing the good deed done, the great deed--or--"