She filled her eyes with him as if she had never seen him before, and would not again. She noted little physical details which had hitherto escaped her--the fine cameo cutting of his features, the long, sensitive, expressive hands, the air he shared with many Europeans of belonging to an older, more finished race than her own. In his calm impassivity there was a suggestion of Slavic fatalism, combined with the tragic patience of the Jew. Only his eyes smoldered with an unquenchable spark that flamed to hers. She knew that the Romance which had always eluded her was here at her side, in the person of this perfect comrade, this shadowy, insistent influence in her life which was about to withdraw into the shadows again. Perhaps she understood, too, that Romance to remain Romance must be elusive. Seized and held, it changes into something else. Yet she tried to cling to it. "You will be right here waiting on this spot when I come back, won't you, Stefan?--For I _will_ come back," she exclaimed as he did not answer. "Say that you know I will!" "I know that you will do whatever seems to you right." She made a mutinous face at him. "That's more than I know! I'm much more likely to do whatever seems to me nice--Oh, Stefan, why will you persist in believing in me always, no matter how badly I behave?" Lightly as she spoke, her eyes were fixed on him, telling him consciously what her lips could not utter. He answered at one of his usual tangents. "Do you not know that every splinter of a genuine Cremona violin vibrates to the bow on as true a tone as did the unbroken instrument?" "You mean--Mother," she said. "Oh, but I'm not all Cremona! I think there's a good deal in me of the fiddle Nero played while Rome burned. It's not _fair_ to be expected to live up to a self-sacrificing mother! If you don't, you have failed her; if you do, she gets the credit--Besides, I'm needed here just as much as I am in Louisville. More! Not only these poor people need me, but--you do, Stefan." She had brought it into the open at last, the one thing which they had never yet discussed in their discussions of everything under the sun; that eternal human question of Thou-and-I. She was a little frightened, dreading yet eager for the answer. It was long in coming. Nikolai understood the crisis they had reached. He knew that it was his to put out his hand and hold her, to keep forever in his life this one gift of the gods he craved, the fulfilled hope which had been his beacon through many a lonely year. Once before because of a mistake in judgment he had lost her, to her own unhappiness. There must be no more mistakes in judgment. But the habit of truth in thought and word was too great for him. "No," he said at last, "I do not need you." He saw her wince.