“Hugo!” she said.  “Hugo!”

I could only repeat her name and regard her helplessly.

“Hugo,” she said, “I am cold.  Take me upstairs.  I am chilled through and through.”

“Oh, but Teresa,” I expostulated, “it wouldn’t be right.  You know it wouldn’t be right.  You might be seen.”

She laid her hand, her ungloved, icy hand, against my cheek.

“I have been here an hour,” she said.  “Take me to your rooms.  I am freezing.”

I led her up the stairs and to my little apartment.  I seated her before the fire, turned up the lights, and stood and looked at her.

“What have you come here for?” I said.  “I’ve paid your father—­ paid him a month ago.”

She made no answer, but spread her hands before the fire and shivered in the glow.  She kept her eyes fixed on the coals in front of her and put out the tips of her little slippered feet.  Then I perceived that she was in a ball gown and that her arms were bare under her opera cloak.

At last she broke the silence.

“How cheerless your room is,” she said, looking about.  “Oh, how cheerless!”

“Did you come here to tell me that?” I said.

“No,” she said.  “I don’t know why I came.  Because I was a fool, I suppose—­a fool to think you’d want to see me.  Take me home, Hugo.”  She rose as she said this and looked towards the door.  I pressed her to take a little whiskey, for she was still as cold as death and as white as the snow queen in Hans Andersen’s tale, but she refused to let me give her any.

“Take me home, please,” she repeated.

Her carriage was waiting a block away.  Hendricks, the footman, received my order with impassivity and shut us in together with the unconcern of a good servant.  It was dark in the carriage, and neither of us spoke as we whirled through the snowy streets.  Once the lights of a passing hansom illumined my companion’s face and I saw that she was crying.  It pleased me to see her suffer; she had cost me eleven weeks of misery; why should she escape scot-free!

“Hugo,” she said, “are you coming back to us, Hugo?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Why don’t you know?” she asked.

“Oh, because!” I said.

“That’s no answer,” she said.

There was a pause.

“I was beginning to care too much about you,” I said.  “I think I was beginning to fall in love with you.  I’ve got out of one false position.  Why should I blunder into another?”

“Would it be a false position to love me?” she said.

“Of course that would a good deal depend on you,” I said.

“Suppose I wanted you to,” she said.

“Oh, but you couldn’t!” I said.

“Why couldn’t I?” she said.

“But forty,” I objected; “nobody loves anybody who’s forty, you know.”

“I do,” she said, “though, come to think of it, you were thirty-nine—­when—­when it first happened, Hugo.”