Jacqueline's blue eyes went round and round the room, in search of some overwhelming proof of her fidelity; then swiftly they returned to Max's.
[Illustration: THE COMPLETE SEMBLANCE OF THE WOMAN]
"Not even to Lucien, madame, shall it be revealed!" And silently Max nodded, realizing the greatness of the pledge.
Many hours later, when all the lights were out in the rue Müller and all the doors wore closed, the slight figure of the boy Max might have been seen by any belated wanderer slipping down the Escalier de Sainte-Marie to post a letter--a letter that had cost much thought, and upon which had been dropped many blots of ink; and had the belated wanderer been possessed of occult powers and wished to probe inside the envelope, the words he would have read were these--scrawled with bold impetuosity:
_Mon Ami_,--My idea--the true idea--has come to me. It was born in the first hour of this new day, and with it has come the knowledge that, either you were right and some artists need solitude, or I am one of the fools I talked of yesterday!
All this means that I am ill of the fever of work, and that for many, many days--many, many weeks--I shall be in my studio--locked away even from you.
Think no unkind thing of me! All my friendship is yours--and all my thought. Be not jealous of my work! Understand! Oh, Ned, understand! And know me, for ever and for ever, your boy.
Of all the ills that circumstance forces upon man, separation from a beloved object is, perhaps, the most salutary. Separation is the crucible wherein love undergoes the test absolute; in the fire of loss, grief softens to indifference or hardens to enduring need.
The pale blue sky of May smiled upon Montmartre. The shrubs in the plantation shimmered forth in green garments, the news-vender by the gate, the little old Basque peasant woman telling her beads in the shade of a holly-tree, even the children screaming at play on the gravelled pathway, were touched with the charm of the hour. Or so it seemed to Max--Max, _debonair_ of carriage--Max, hastening to a _rendezvous_ with fast-beating heart and nerves that throbbed alternately to a wild joy of anticipation and a ridiculous, self-conscious dread.
How he had counted upon the moment! How he had loved and feared it in ardent, varying imagination! And now, that it had at last arrived, how hopelessly his prearranged actions eluded him, how humanly his rehearsed sentences failed to marshal themselves for speech! As he climbed up the plantation, dazzled by the sun, intoxicated by the budding summer, he felt the merest unsophisticated youth--the merest novice, dumb and impotent under his own emotions.