“I sha’n’t be here long,” he rejoined, his lips stiffening with the effort to say just so much and no more.

“No; I know.  But I’m improvident:  I live in the moment when I’m happy.”

The words stole through him like a temptation, and to close his senses to it he moved away from the hearth and stood gazing out at the black tree-boles against the snow.  But it was as if she too had shifted her place, and he still saw her, between himself and the trees, drooping over the fire with her indolent smile.  Archer’s heart was beating insubordinately.  What if it were from him that she had been running away, and if she had waited to tell him so till they were here alone together in this secret room?

“Ellen, if I’m really a help to you—­if you really wanted me to come—­tell me what’s wrong, tell me what it is you’re running away from,” he insisted.

He spoke without shifting his position, without even turning to look at her:  if the thing was to happen, it was to happen in this way, with the whole width of the room between them, and his eyes still fixed on the outer snow.

For a long moment she was silent; and in that moment Archer imagined her, almost heard her, stealing up behind him to throw her light arms about his neck.  While he waited, soul and body throbbing with the miracle to come, his eyes mechanically received the image of a heavily-coated man with his fur collar turned up who was advancing along the path to the house.  The man was Julius Beaufort.

“Ah—!” Archer cried, bursting into a laugh.

Madame Olenska had sprung up and moved to his side, slipping her hand into his; but after a glance through the window her face paled and she shrank back.

“So that was it?” Archer said derisively.

“I didn’t know he was here,” Madame Olenska murmured.  Her hand still clung to Archer’s; but he drew away from her, and walking out into the passage threw open the door of the house.

“Hallo, Beaufort—­this way!  Madame Olenska was expecting you,” he said.

During his journey back to New York the next morning, Archer relived with a fatiguing vividness his last moments at Skuytercliff.

Beaufort, though clearly annoyed at finding him with Madame Olenska, had, as usual, carried off the situation high-handedly.  His way of ignoring people whose presence inconvenienced him actually gave them, if they were sensitive to it, a feeling of invisibility, of nonexistence.  Archer, as the three strolled back through the park, was aware of this odd sense of disembodiment; and humbling as it was to his vanity it gave him the ghostly advantage of observing unobserved.