"Do you love me, Claire?" he asked, tensely.
She did not answer, but her head sank against his shoulder.
Outside the cabin, she heard Philip's step in the snow.
"No!" she cried frantically, filled with dread. "No, no! Let me go!"
Lawrence, too, heard, and released her, stepping back indifferently, as though just going toward a chair.
"Oh, you're back, I see." The artist was coldly cordial in his greeting.
"And I see you, which is more important," Philip laughed.
"I suppose so." Lawrence sat down, thoughtfully. "Claire has just scolded me for going out. She doesn't like to have me add to the bother I am already."
Claire was still under the spell of her own emotion, and she resented Lawrence's sang-froid. He was as cold as a block of stone. Her heart cried out against him because he could not see why she had said "No" to him, because he believed her! She wanted to cry, but did not dare.
"I told him we were worried," she said, indifferently.
"So we were." Philip was cheerful and friendly.
Lawrence buried himself from them both, and sat brooding, clothed in the blackness that blindness brought when it suddenly loomed before him as the wall between him and his life's desires. The brief instant Claire had been in his arms had made him feel that his life was intolerable without her, and that blindness was the curse of a double living death. She had told him that she did not love him. She had struggled to be free.
Lawrence failed to read Claire aright because he had not seen her, and because his blindness made him uncertain of himself.
That was the truth of it all, the awful truth of his life.
He was always uncertain of himself because he was afraid of blindness. He strutted, boasted, lied, and above all pretended to himself that he believed his hard philosophy because he was afraid, afraid of failing to do the things he wanted to do. He saw himself clearly now, he was a coward, a deceiving ape, a monkey caught in the terror of tangling roots, and denying it. He barked like a frightened dog, at the thing that was his master. He was gripped by life, tortured by life, denied death by life, and cheated by life of living. His imagination, fired by his passion, leaped into play, and he felt himself a thousand times a slave, a chained prisoner in the hand of circumstance.