He turned with too swift a movement—then, too slowly, as if in deliberate emphasis, he completed the task of pouring the wine, filling the three vessels on the table. He picked up the two silver goblets, looked down at them for the pause of an instant, then extended one to Dagny, the other to Galt.
"Take it," he said. "You've earned it—and it wasn't chance."
Galt took the goblet from his hand, but it was as if the acceptance was done by their eyes as they looked at each other.
"I would have given anything to let it be otherwise," said Galt, "except that which is beyond giving."
She held her goblet, she looked at Francisco and she let him see her eyes glance at Galt. "Yes,” she said in the tone of an answer, "But I have not earned it—and what you've paid, I'm paying it now, and I don't know whether I'll ever earn enough to hold clear title, but if hell is the price—and the measure—then let me be the greediest of the three of us."
As they drank, as she stood, her eyes closed, feeling the liquid motion of the wine inside her throat, she knew that for all three of them this was the most tortured—and the most exultant—moment they had ever reached.
She did not speak to Galt, as they walked down the last stretch of the trail to his house. She did not turn her head to him, feeling that even a glance would be too dangerous. She felt, in their silence, both the calm of a total understanding and the tension of the knowledge that they were not to name the things they understood.
But she faced him, when they were in his living room, with full confidence and as if in sudden certainty of a right—the certainty that she would not break and that it was now safe to speak. She said evenly, neither as plea nor as triumph, merely as the statement of a fact, "You are going back to the outer world because I will be there."
"Yes."
"I do not want you to go."
"You have no choice about it."
"You are going for my sake."
"No, for mine."
"Will you allow me to see you there?"
"No."
"I am not to see you?"
"No."
"I am not to know where you are or what you do?"
"You're not."
"Will you be watching me, as you did before?"
"More so."
"Is your purpose to protect me?"
"No."
"What is it, then?"
"To be there on the day when you decide to join us."
She looked at him attentively, permitting herself no other reaction, but as if groping for an answer to the first point she had not fully understood.
"All the rest of us will be gone," he explained. "It will become too dangerous to remain. I will remain as your last key, before the door of this valley closes altogether."
"Oh!" She choked it off before it became a moan. Then, regaining the manner of impersonal detachment, she asked, "Suppose I were to tell you that my decision is final and that I am never to join you?"
"It would be a lie."
"Suppose I were now to decide that I wish to make it final and to stand by it, no matter what the future?"
"No matter what future evidence you observe and what convictions you form?"
"Yes."
"That would be worse than a lie.”
"You are certain that I have made the wrong decision?”
"I am."
"Do you believe that one must be responsible for one's own errors?"
"I do."
"Then why aren't you letting me bear the consequences of mine?"
"I am and you will."
"If I find, when it is too late, that I want to return to this valley —why should you have to bear the risk of keeping that door open to me?"
"I don't have to. I wouldn't do it if I had no selfish end to gain."
"What selfish end?"
"I want you here."
She closed her eyes and inclined her head in open admission of defeat—defeat in the argument and in her attempt to face calmly the full meaning of that which she was leaving.
Then she raised her head and, as if she had absorbed his kind of frankness, she looked at him, hiding neither her suffering nor her longing nor her calm, knowing that all three were in her glance.
His face was as it had been in the sunlight of the moment when she had seen it for the first time: a face of merciless serenity and unflinching perceptiveness, without pain or fear or guilt. She thought that were it possible for her to stand looking at him, at the straight lines of his eyebrows over the dark green eyes, at the curve of the shadow underscoring the shape of his mouth, at the poured-metal planes of his skin in the open collar of his shirt and the casually immovable posture of his legs—she would wish to spend the rest of her life on this spot and in this manner. And in the next instant she knew that if her wish were granted, the contemplation would lose all meaning, because she would have betrayed all the things that gave it value.
