He walked over to his desk, and sank down into the arm chair.
"I don't--know--what--you're--talking--about."
"You do! And if you don't, why do you look out of the window there every night? Why d'you wait for it to come, before you start to write?"
"Yes. Its shadow--; from this room where I kept it--casting--over--there--its--shadow."
So that was what she meant. The superstition-fostered thing that epitomized his genius to himself. The shadow that he had come to look upon as a sign of luck. But it was nonsense. It wasn't possible; not such rot as that. It was his mind; the big creative mind of him that wrote.
For a second her gaze met his and then the heavy lids came down again over those strange green eyes, hiding all expression.
He looked out of the window. His eyes stared through the night beyond the two shadowy, drooping willow trees on either side of the wicker gate and over at the house opposite. He caught his breath. The yellow light from the lamp on his desk played across the clear blank of the window blind across the way. The shadow had gone.
"It's not there, Ellen--; six years; now--; why, Ellen--"
She went and sat down in the chair beside the desk.
"I thought it could make no difference to you!"
He made an effort to pull himself together.
"It won't make any difference to me--not to my writing; not to my genius."
After the silence of a moment her voice came to him in its low even measure.
"Of course." His tone was high pitched, hysterical. "Naturally I'll write."
He caught up his pen and dipped it in the ink. He drew the white pile of paper nearer to him.
"How can I work if you don't stop talking? How can I do anything? How can I write?"
"Because;" she went on very quietly. "It's gone back, Jasper. It's--gone--now--"
His pen went to and fro; to and fro across the page. His figure was bent well over the desk. Every now and again, without moving, his bulging blue eyes would lift themselves to the clear blank blind of the window opposite and then they would come back and fix themselves intently upon the white page of paper which he was so busily covering with stupid, meaningless little drawings.
"Mr. Evans is upstairs in the library, ma'am."
Genevieve Evans hurried through the hall and up the steps. She pulled off her gloves as she went. She rolled them into a hard, small ball and tucked them automatically in her muff.