“I’m not playing.  It’s true!  It’s true!” Dark eyes, with dark lines beneath them, stared at Blake, carrying conviction.  “It’s true!  It’s true!  I do not know.”

“God, boy!” Blake faltered in his vehemence.

“It’s true!” said Max again.

“True that she’s gone—­vanished?  That I can’t find her?  That you can’t find her?  It isn’t!”

“It is.”

The blood rushed into Blake’s face.  For a moment he stood rigid and speechless, drinking in the fact; then his feelings broke bounds.

“It’s true?  And you stand there, gaping!  God, boy, rouse yourself!” He caught him by the shoulder and shook him.  “Don’t you know what this is?  Have you never seen a man dealt a mortal blow?”

“Love is not everything!” cried Max.

“Not everything?  Oh, you poor, damned little fool, how bitterly you’ll retract that prating!  Not everything?  Isn’t water everything in a parched desert?  Isn’t the sun everything to a frozen world?” He stopped, suddenly loosing the boy, casting him from him, a thing of no significance.

Max, faint and pale, caught at his arm.

“Ned!  Ned!  I am here.  I am your friend.  I love you.”

Blake, in all his whirl of passion, paused.

“You!” he said, and no long eloquence could have accentuated the blank amazement, the searing irony of the word.

But Max closed all his senses.

“Ned!  Ned!  Look at the truth of life!  There is in me everything but one thing.”

“Then, by God, that one thing is everything!  It’s the woman and the man that rule this world.  The woman and the man—­the soul and the body!  All other things are dust and chaff.”

“You feel that now.  But time—­time balances.  We will be happy yet.  We will relive the old days—­”

Blake turned, wrenching away his arm.  “The old days?  Do you imagine Paris can hold me now she is gone?”

“Ned!”

“Do you imagine I can live in this town—­climb these steps—­stand on that balcony, that breathes of her?”

Max was leaning back against the window-frame.  His brain seemed empty of blood, his heart seemed to pulse in a strange, unfamiliar fashion, while somewhere within his consciousness a tiny voice commanded him urgently to preserve his strength—­not to betray himself.

“You will go away?” he heard himself say.  “Where will you go?  To Ireland?”

“To Ireland—­or hell!” Blake walked to the door.

“Then you are leaving me?”

“You shall know where I am.”

“And if I should need you?”

Blake made no answer; he did not even look back.

“If—­if she should need you?”

He turned.

“I will come to her at any moment—­from anywhere.”

The door closed.  He was gone, and Max stood leaning against the window.  His blood still circulated oddly, and now the inner voice with its reiterated commands was rising, rising until it became the thunder of a sea that filled his ears, annihilating all other sounds.  A swift, sharp terror smote him; he sought desperately to maintain his consciousness, but, breaking across the effort an icy breath crept up from nowhere, fanning his cheek, suspending all struggle, and a palpable darkness, like the darkness of brooding wings, closed in upon him, bringing oblivion.