o days?"

"Yes; in two days."

"_Alors_--_au revoir!_"

"_Au revoir_, Madame."

Thus they entered upon the eight-and-forty hours that were to prepare
the storm of the next meeting which was to set upon them both the seal
of the inevitable. Well for Prince G---- that there came to him no
inkling of the scene which ended that second afternoon! Irina lay back
upon the artist's couch in the dreamy languor of her most dangerous
mood. Joseph knelt on the floor at her side, her hands clasped in his,
the broken, cryptic syllables of innermost intimacy already flowing
familiarly between them.--How it had come about, neither one of them
could possibly have told. But that night Joseph, sitting alone at his
high window gazing over the silvered city, knew at last that he had
entered into the kingdom: that, if he should live a thousand years, he
could never know again the pure emotion of the hours that were gone. He
sat there in the dusk, and his lips formed broken phrases--fragments of
the thoughts that swirled through his storm-ridden brain:

"It has come!--It is here!--I am a true artist now.--Now, too, I am a
man.--Irina!--Irina!"

And, alas! Joseph fully believed himself! He never knew that, had he
been in truth an artist now, those last words of his would have been:
"My work! My work!" For to those who hold the greatest gift, there is no
experience in life, from highest joy to highest sorrow, that is not
transmuted, in the crucible of the artist's brain, into some new form of
knowledge to be used in his labor. Such a one was Ivan, whom Nathalie
herself could only have served again and again to quicken into higher
and richer musical expression: to whom her loss had only meant many
years of minor melodies. Such a man as Ivan, Joseph still believed
himself to be. Slowly, inch by inch, with every step a form of torture,
was he to learn the truth.

Thus abruptly, thus all unheralded, arrived Joseph's passion-time. In
the beginning, Irina came for her sittings twice or thrice in the week.
Then, driven by the force of their two natures, the visits became daily,
and there began, in the Fourmenny _maisonnette_, a system of shift and
subterfuge not wholly new to its mistress. None knew better than Irina
herself the inevitable end of this period of excuse and deception. But,
so long as Joseph continued to combine for her those qualities of
novelty, inexperience, and inexhaustible feeling that had seized so
firmly upon her imagina