She had never heard that low, breathless quality of helplessness in his voice. He was fighting to regain control, there was almost a touch of apology in his smile, the apology of a child pleading for indulgence, but there was also an adult's amusement, the laughing declaration that he did not have to hide his struggle, since it was happiness that he was wrestling with, not pain.

She backed away from him; she felt as if emotion had flung her ahead of her own consciousness, and questions were now catching up with her, groping toward the form of words.

"Dagny, that torture you've been going through, here, for the last month . . . answer me as honestly as you can . . . do you think you could have borne it twelve years ago?"

"No," she answered; he smiled. "Why do you ask that?"

"To redeem twelve years of my life, which I won't have to regret."

"What do you mean? And"—her questions had caught up with her—"and what do you know about my torture here?"

"Dagny, aren't you beginning to see that I would know everything about it?"

"How did you . . . Francisco! What were you whistling when you were coming up the hill?"

"Why, was I? I don't know."

"It was the Fifth Concerto by Richard Halley, wasn't it?"

"Oh . . . ]” He looked startled, then smiled in amusement at himself, then answered gravely, "I'll tell you that later."

"How did you find out where I was?"

"I'll tell you that, too."

"You forced it out of Eddie."

"I haven't seen Eddie for over a year."

"He was the only one who knew it."

"It wasn't Eddie who told me."

"I didn't want anybody to find me."

He glanced slowly about him, she saw his eyes stop on the path she had built, on the planted flowers, on the fresh-shingled roof. He chuckled, as if he understood and as if it hurt him. "You shouldn't have been left here for a month," he said. "God, you shouldn't have! It's my first failure, at the one time when I didn't want to fail. But I didn't think you were ready to quit. Had I known it, I would have watched you day and night."

"Really? What for?"

"To spare you"—he pointed at her work—"all this."

"Francisco," she said, her voice low, "if you're concerned about my torture, don't you know that I don't want to hear you speak of it, because—" She stopped; she had never complained to him, not in all those years; her voice flat, she 'said only, "—that I don't want to hear it?"

"Because I'm the one man who has no right to speak of it? Dagny, if you think that I don't know how much I've hurt you, I'll tell you about the years when I . . . But it's over. Oh, darling, it's over!"

"Is it?"

"Forgive me, I mustn't say that. Not until you say it," He was trying to control his voice, but the look of happiness was beyond his power of control.

"Are you happy because I've lost everything I lived for? All right, I'll say it, if this is what you've come to hear: you were the first thing I lost—does it amuse you now to see that I've lost the rest?"

He glanced straight at her, his eyes drawn narrow by such an intensity of earnestness that the glance was almost a threat, and she knew that whatever the years had meant to him, "amusement" was the one word she had no right to utter.

"Do you really think that?" he asked.

She whispered, "No . . ."

"Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we've made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are ours to make."

"'That is what I've been telling myself for a month. But there's no way left open toward any purpose whatever."

He did not answer. He sat down on a boulder by the door of the cabin, watching her as if he did not want to miss a single shadow of reaction on her face. "What do you think now of the men who quit and vanished?" he asked.

She shrugged, with a faint smile of helpless sadness, and sat down on the ground beside him. "You know," she said, "I used to think that there was some destroyer who came after them and made them quit.

But I guess there wasn't. There have been times, this past month, when I've almost wished he would come for me, too. But nobody came."

"No?"

"No. I used to think that he gave them some inconceivable reason to make them betray everything they loved. But that wasn't necessary.

I know how they felt. I can't blame them any longer. What I don't know is how they learned to exist afterward—if any of them still exist."

"Do you feel that you've betrayed Taggart Transcontinental?"

"No. I . . . I feel that I would have betrayed it by remaining at work."

"You would have."

"If I had agreed to serve the looters, it's . . . it's Nat Taggart that I would have delivered to them. I couldn't. I couldn't let his achievement, and mine, end up with the looters as our final goal."

"No, you couldn't. Do you call this indifference? Do you think that you love the railroad less than you did a month ago?"

"I think that I would give my life for just one more year on the railroad . . . But I can't go back to it."

"Then you know what they felt, all the men who quit, and what it was that they loved when they gave up."

"Francisco," she asked, not looking at him, her head bent, "why did you ask me whether I could have given it up twelve years ago?"

"Don't you know what night I am thinking of, just as you are?"

"Yes . . ." she whispered.

"That was the night I gave up d'Anconia Copper."

Slowly, with a long effort, she moved her head to glance up at him.

His face had the expression she had seen then, on that next morning, twelve years ago: the look of a smile, though he was not smiling, the quiet look of victory over pain, the look of a man's pride in the price he paid and in that which made it worth paying.

"But you didn't give it up," she said. "You didn't quit. You're still the President of d'Anconia Copper, only it means nothing to you now."

"It means as much to me now as it did that night."

"Then how can you let it go to pieces?"

"Dagny, you're more fortunate than I. Taggart Transcontinental is a delicate piece of precision machinery. It will not last long without you. It cannot be run by slave labor. They will mercifully destroy it for you and you won't have to see it serving the looters. But copper mining is a simpler job. D'Anconia Copper could have lasted for generations of looters and slaves. Crudely, miserably, ineptly—but it could have lasted and helped them to last. I had to destroy it myself."

-You—what?"

"I am destroying d'Anconia Copper, consciously, deliberately, by plan and by my own hand. I have to plan it as carefully and work as hard as if I were producing a fortune—in order not to let them notice it and stop me, in order not to let them seize the mines until it is too late. AH the effort and energy I had hoped to spend on d'Anconia Copper, I'm spending them, only . . . only it's not to make it grow. I shall destroy every last bit of it and every last penny of my fortune and every ounce of copper that could feed the looters. I shall not leave it as I found it—I shall leave it as Sebastian d'Anconia found it—then let them try to exist without him or me!"

"Francisco!" she screamed. "How could you make yourself do it?"

"By the grace of the same love as yours," he answered quietly, "my love for d'Anconia Copper, for the spirit of which it was the shape.

Was—and, some day, will be again."

She sat still, trying to grasp all the implications of what she now grasped only as the numbness of shock. In the silence, the music of the radio symphony went on, and the rhythm of the chords reached her like the slow, solemn pounding of steps, while she struggled to see at once the whole progression of twelve years: the tortured boy who called for help on her breasts—the man who sat on the floor of a drawing room, playing marbles and laughing at the destruction of great industries—the man who cried, "My love, I can't!" while refusing to help her—the man who drank a toast, in the dim booth of a barroom, to the years which Sebastian d'Anconia had had to wait. . . .