“Don’t be fantastical!” he said.  “We are not holding a debate on sex.  If we are to be normal, we must declare that man and woman don’t compare!”

“Now you are gambling with words!  I desire facts.  It is a fact that until to-day I was enough—­friend enough—­companion enough—­”

“My child!”

But Max rushed on, lashing himself to rage.

“I was enough; but now you desire more.  And why?  Why?  Not because you discern more in the new personality, but because it appeals to you as the personality of a woman.  There is nothing deeper—­nothing more in the affair—­no other reason, as you yourself would say, upon God’s earth!” He ended abruptly; his arms fell to his sides; his voice held in it a sound perilously like a sob.

Blake looked at him in surprise.

“My good boy,” he said, “you’re forgetting the terms of our friendship; to my knowledge they never included hysterics.”

The tonic effect of the words was supreme; the sob was strangled in Max’s throat; a swift, pained certainty came to him that Blake would not have spoken these words in the plantation that morning, would not have spoken them as they raced together up the Escalier de Sainte-Marie.

“I understand, mon ami!” he said, tensely.  “I understand so perfectly that, were you dying, and were this request your last, I would refuse it!  I hope I have explained myself!”

The tone was bitter and contemptuous, it succeeded in stinging Blake.  Up to that moment he had played with the affair; now the play became earnest, his own temper was stirred.

“Thanks, boy!” he said; “but when I’m dying I’ll hope for an archangel to attend to my wants—­not a little cherub.  Good-night to you!” Without look or gesture of farewell, he picked up his hat and walked out of the room.

Once before this thing had happened; once before Max had heard the closing of the door, and known the blank isolation following upon it.  But then weeks of close companionship, weeks of growing affection had preceded the moment, giving strength for its endurance; now it came hot upon a long abstinence from friendship, an abstinence made doubly poignant by one day’s complete reunion.

For a moment he stood—­pride upon his right hand, love upon his left; for a moment he stood, waging his secret war, then with amazing suddenness, the issue was decided, he capitulated shamelessly.  Pride melted into the night and love caught him in a quick embrace.

Lithe and silent as some creature of the forest, he was across the studio and down the stairs, his mind tense, his desires fixed upon one point.

Blake was crossing the dim hallway as the light feet skimmed the last slippery steps; he paused in answer to a swift, eager call.

“Ned!  Ned!  Wait!  Ned, I want you!”

Blake paused; in the dim light it was not possible to read his face, but something in the outline of his figure, in the rigidity and definiteness of his stopping, chilled the boy with a sense of antagonism.