Max set his lips and studiously averted his face.
"Come! Tell me where she is! Time counts."
"I expected that! You're lying, of course; but when you're up against a man in my frame of mind, lies are poor ammunition. I don't ask you why she has gone--that's between her and me, that's my affair. But I must know where she is."
"You cannot refuse to tell me! Look here, boy, you've always seen my soft side, you don't believe there is a hard one. But we Irish can surprise you."
Max had no physical fear, but he backed involuntarily before the menace in Blake's eyes.
"I'm not lying to you, Ned. I cannot tell you, because I do not know. My sister Maxine has ceased to exist--for me, as much as for you."
"Stop!" Blake stepped close to him and for an instant his hand was raised, but it fell at once to his side, and he laughed once more, harshly and self-consciously. "Don't play with me, boy! I've had a hard knock."
"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.
"True that she's gone--vanished? That I can't find her? That you can't find her? It isn't!"
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?"
"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.
"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.
"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."