I

HE had never seen Eppie again, and sixteen years had passed.

It was of this that Gavan was thinking as the Scotch express bore him northward on a dark October night.

A yellow-bound, half-cut volume of French essays lay beside him. He had lighted a cigar and, his feet warmly ensconced on the hot-water tin, his legs enfolded in rugs, the fur collar of his coat turned up about his ears, he leaned back, well fortified against the sharp air that struck in from the half-opened window.

Gavan, at thirty, had oddly maintained all the more obvious characteristics of his boyhood. He was long, pale, emaciated, as he had been at fourteen. His clean-shaved face was the boy’s face, matured, but unchanged in essentials. The broad, steep brow, the clear, aquiline jut of nose and chin, the fineness and strength of the jaw, sculptured now by the light overhead into vehement relief and shadow, were more emphatic, only, than they had been.

At fourteen his face had surprised with its maturity and at thirty it surprised with its quality of wistful boyishness. This was the obvious. The changes were there, but they were subtle, consisting more in a certain hardening of youth’s hesitancy into austerity; as though the fine metal of the countenance had been tempered by time into a fixed, enduring type. His pallor was the scholar’s, but his emaciation the athlete’s; the fragility, now, was a braced and disciplined fragility. No sedentary softness was in him. In his body, as in his face, one felt a delicacy as strong as it was fine. The great change was that hardening to fixity.

To-night, he was feeling the change himself. The journey to Kirklands, after the long gap that lay between it and his farewell, made something of an epoch for his thoughts. He did not find it significant, but the mere sense of comparison was arresting.

The darkness of the October night, speeding by outside, the solitude of the bright railway carriage, London two hours behind and, before, the many hours of his lonely journey,—time and place were like empty goblets, only waiting to be filled with the still wine of memory.

Gavan had not cast aside his book, lighted his cigar, and, leaning back, drawn his rugs about him with the conscious intention of yielding himself to retrospect. On the contrary, he had, at first, pushed aside the thoughts that, softly, persistently, pressed round him. Then the languor, the opportunity of the hour seized him. He allowed himself to drift hither and thither, as first one eddy lapped over him and then another. And finally he abandoned himself to the full current and, once it had him, it carried him far.

It was, at the beginning, as far back as Eppie and childhood that it carried him, to the sunny summer days and to the speechless parting of the rainy autumn morning. And, with all that sense of change, he was surprised to find how very much one thing had held firm. He had never forgotten. He had kept the mute promise of that misty morning. How well he had kept it he hadn’t known until he found the chain of memory hold so firm as he pulled upon it. The promise had been made to himself as well as to her, given in solemn hostage to his own childish fears. Even then what an intuitive dread had been upon him of the impermanence of things. But it wasn’t impermanent after all, that vision.

Dear little Eppie. It was astonishing now to find how well he remembered, how clearly he could see, in looking back,—more clearly than even his acute child’s perception had made evident to him,—what a dear little Eppie she had been. She lived in his memory, and probably nowhere else: in the present Eppie he didn’t fancy that he should find much trace of the child Eppie, and it was sad, in its funny way, to think that he, who had, with all his forebodings, so felt the need of a promise, should so well remember her who, undoubtedly, had long ago forgotten him. He took little interest in the present Eppie. But the child wore perfectly with time.

Dear child Eppie and strange, distant boy, groping toward the present Gavan; unhappy little boy, of deep, inarticulate, passionate affections and of deep hopes and dreads. There they walked, knee-deep in heather; he smelled it, the sun warm upon it, Eppie in her white, Alice-in-Wonderland frock and her “striped” hair. And there went Robbie, plunging through the heather before them.

Robbie. Eppie had been right, then. He had not forgotten him at all. He and Eppie stood at the window looking out at the dawn; the scent of the wet pine-tree was in the air, and their eyes were heavy with weeping. How near they had been. Had any one, in all his life, ever been nearer him than Eppie?

Curious, when he had so well kept the promise never to forget, that the other promise, the promise to return, he had not been able to keep. In making it, he had not imagined, even with his foreboding, what manacles of routine and theory were to be locked upon him for the rest of his boyhood. He had soon learned that protest, pleading, rebellion, were equally vain, and that outward conformity was the preservative of inner freedom. He could not jeopardize the purpose of his life—his mother’s rescue—by a persistence that, in his uncle’s not unkind and not unhumorous eyes, was merely foolish. He was forced to swallow his own longings and to endure, as best he could, his pangs of fear lest Eppie should think him slack, or even faithless. He submitted to the treadmill of a highly organized education, that could spare no time for insignificant summers in Scotland. Every moment in Gavan’s youth was to be made significant by tangible achievement. The distilled knowledge of the past, the intellectual trophies of civilization, were to be his; if he didn’t want them, they, in the finished and effective figure of his uncle, wanted him, and, in the sense of the fulfilment of his uncle’s hopes, they got him.

During those years Gavan wrote to Eppie, tried to make her share with him in all the lonely and rather abstract interests of his life. But he found that the four years of difference, counting for nothing in the actual intercourse of word and look, counted for everything against any reality of intercourse in writing. Translated into that formality, the childish affection became as unlike itself as a pressed flower is unlike a fresh one. Eppie’s letters, punctual and very fond, were far more immature than she herself. These letters gave accounts of animals, walks, lessons, very bald and concise, and of the Grainger cousins and their doings, and then of her new relation, cousin Alicia, whose daughters, children of Eppie’s own age, soon seemed to poor Gavan, in his distant prison, to fill his place. Eppie went away with these cousins to Germany, where they all heard wonderful music, and after that they came to Kirklands for the summer. Altogether, when Gavan’s opportunity came and, with the dignity of seventeen to back his request, he had his uncle’s consent to his spending of a month in Scotland, he felt himself, even as he made it, rather silly in his determination to cling at all costs to something precious but vanishing. Then it was that Eppie had been swept away by the engulfing relative. At the very moment of his own release, she was taken to the Continent for three years of travel and study. The final effort of childhood to hold to its own meaning was frustrated. The letters, after that, soon ceased. Silence ended the first chapter.

Gavan glanced out at the rushing darkness on either side. It was like the sliding of a curtain before the first act of a drama. His cigar was done and he did not light another. His eyes on that darkness that passed and passed, he gave himself up to the long vision of the nearer years. Through them went always the link with childhood, the haunting phrase that sounded in every scene—that fear of life, that deep dread of its evil and its pain that he had tried to hide from Eppie, but that, together, they had glanced at.

In that first chapter, whose page he had just turned, he had seen himself as a very unhappy boy—unhappy from causes as apparent as a cage about a pining bird. His youth had been weighted with an over-mature understanding of wrong and sorrow. His childish faith in supreme good had shaped itself to a conception of life as a place of probation where oneself and, far worse, those one loved were burned continually in the fiery furnace of inexplicable affliction. One couldn’t say what God might not demand of one in the way of endurance. He had, helpless, seen his fragile, shrinking mother hatefully bullied and abused or more hatefully caressed. He had been parted from her to brood and tremble over her distant fate. Loved things had died; loved things had all, it seemed, been taken from him; the soulless machinery of his uncle’s system had ground and polished at his stiffening heart. No wonder that the boy of that first chapter had been very unhappy. But in the later chapters, to which he had now come, the causes for unhappiness were not so obvious, yet the gloom that overhung them deepened. He saw himself at Eton in the hedged-round world of buoyant youth, standing apart, preoccupied, indifferent. He had been oddly popular there. His selflessness, his gentle candor, his capacity for a highly keyed joy,—strung, though it was, over an incapacity for peace,—endeared him; but even to his friends he remained a veiled and ambiguous personality. He seemed to himself to stand on the confines of that artificially happy domain, listening always for the sound of sorrow in the greater world outside. History, growing before his growing mind, loomed blood-stained, cruel, disastrous. The defeat of goodness, its degradation by the triumphant forces of evil, haunted him. The dependence of mind, of soul, on body opened new and ominous vistas. For months he was pursued by morbid fears of what a jostled brain-cell or a diseased body might do to one. One might become a fiend, it seemed, or an imbecile, if one’s atoms were disarranged too much. Life was a tragic duty,—he held to that blindly, fiercely at times; but what if life’s chances made even goodness impossible? what if it were to rob one of one’s very selfhood? It became to him a thing dangerous, uncertain, like an insecurely chained wild beast that one must lie down with and rise with and that might spring at one’s throat at any moment.

Under the pressure of this new knowledge, crude enough in its materialistic forms, and keen, new thought, already subtle, already passing from youthful crudity, the skeptical crash of his religious faith came at last upon him. Religion had meant too much to him for its loss to be the merely disturbing epoch of readjustment that it is in much young development. He found himself in a reeling horror of darkness where the only lights were the dim beacons of science and the fantastic will-o’-the-wisps of estheticism. In the midst of the chaos he saw his mother again. He dreaded the longed-for meeting. How could he see her and hide from her the inner desolation? And when she came, at last, after all these years, a desperate pity nerved him to act a part. She was changed; the years had told on her more than even his imagination had feared. She drooped like a tired, fading flower. She was fading, that he saw at the first glance. Mentally as well as physically, there was an air of withering about her, and the look of sorrow was stamped ineffaceably upon her aging features. To know that he had lost his faith, his hold on life, his trust in good, would have been, he thought, to kill her. He kept from her a whisper of his desolation; and to a fundamental skepticism like his, acting was facile. But when she was gone, back to her parched life, he knew that to her, as well as to him, something essential had lacked. Her love, again and again, must have fluttered, however blindly, against that barrier between them. The years of separation had been sad, but, in looking back at it, the summer of meeting was saddest of all.

The experience put an edge to his hardening strength. He must fail her in essentials; they could never meet in the blessed nearness of shared hopes; but he wouldn’t fail her in all the lesser things of life. The time of her deliverance was near. Love and beauty would soon be about her. He worked at Oxford with the inner passion of a larger purpose than mere scholarship that is the soul of true scholarship. He felt the sharp, cold joy of high achievement, the Alpine, precipitous scaling of the mind. And here he embarked upon the conscious quest for truth, his skepticism grown to a doubt of its own premises.

Gavan looked quietly back upon the turmoil of that quest.

He watched himself in those young years pressing restlessly, eagerly, pursued by the phantoms of death and nothingness, through spiral after spiral of human thought: through Spinoza’s horror of the meaninglessness of life and through Spinoza’s barren peace; through Kant’s skepticism that would not let him rest in Kant’s super-rational assurance; precipitated from Hegel’s dialectics—building their pyramid of paradox to the apex of an impersonal Absolute—into Schopenhauer’s petulant despair. And more and more clearly he saw, through all the forms of thought, that the finite self dissolved like mist in the one all-embracing, all-transcending Subject. Science, philosophy, religion, seemed, in their final development, to merge in a Monism that conceived reality as spirit, but as impersonal spirit, a conception that, if in western thought it did not reduce to illusion every phase of experience, yet reduced the finite self to a contradiction and its sense of moral freedom, upon which were built all the valuations of life and all its sanctions, to a self-deception. His own dual life deepened his abiding intuition of unreality. There was the Gavan of the river, the debate, the dinner, popular among his fellows, gentle, debonair; already the man of the world through the fineness of his perception, his instinct for the fitting, his perfection of mannerless manner that was the flower of selflessness. And there was the Gavan of the inner thought, fixed, always, in its knot of torturing perplexity. To the inner Gavan, the Gavan of human relations was a wraith-like figure. Now began for him the strange experience at which childish terrors had hinted. It was in the exhaustions that followed a long wrench of thought, or after an illness, a shock of sorrow that left one pulseless and inert, that these pauses of an awful peace would come to him. One faced, then, the dread vision, and it seized one, as when, in the deep stillness of the night, the world drops from one and only a consciousness, dispassionate and contemplative, seeing all life as dream, remains. It was when life was thus stilled, its desires quenched by weakness or great sorrow, that this peace stole into the empty chambers, and whispered that all pain, all evil, all life were dreams and that the dreams were made by the strife and restlessness of the fragmentary self in its endless discord. See oneself as discord, as part of the whole, every thought, every act, every feeling determined by it, and one entered, as it were, into the unwilling redemption. Desire, striving, hope, and fear fell from one. One found the secret of the Eternal Now, holding in its timelessness the vast vision of a world of change. But to Gavan, in these moments, the sorrow, the striving, the agony of life was sweet and desirable; for, to the finite life that strove, and hoped, and suffered the vision became the sightless gaze of death, and nothingness was the guerdon of such attainment. To turn, with an almost physical sickness of horror, from the hypnotic spell, to forcibly forget thought, to clasp life about him like a loved Nessus-robe, was a frequent solution during these years of struggle; to reËnter the place of joy and sorrow, taking it, so to speak, at its own terms. But the specter was never far from the inner Gavan, who more and more suspected that the longing for reality, for significance, that flamed up in him with each renewal of personal force and energy, was the mere result of life, not its sanction. And more and more, when, in such renewals, his nature turned with a desperate trust to action, as a possible test of worth, he saw that it was not action, not faith, that created life and the trust in life, but life, the force and will incarnated in one, that created faith and action. The very will to act was the will to live, and the will to live was the will of the Whole that the particular discord of one’s personal self should continue to strive and suffer.

Life, indeed, clutched him, and that quite without any artificial effort of his own, when his mother came home to England to die.

Gavan had just left Oxford. He was exquisitely equipped for the best things of life, and, with the achievement, his long dependence on his uncle suddenly ceased. An eccentric old cousin, a scholarly recluse, who had taken a fancy to him, died, leaving him a small estate in Surrey and fifteen hundred pounds a year.

With the good fortune came the bitter irony that turned it to dust and ashes. All his life he had longed to help his mother, to smooth her rough path and put power over fate into her hand. Now he could only help her to die in peace.

He took her to the quiet old house, among its lawns, its hedges, its high-walled gardens and deep woods. He gave her all that it was now too late to give—beauty, ease, and love.

She was changed by disease, more changed than by life and sorrow; gentle, very patient, but only by an effort showing her appreciation of the loveliness, only by an effort answering his love.

Of all his fears the worst had been the fear that, with the conviction of the worthlessness of life, the capacity for love had left him. Now, as with intolerable anguish, her life ebbed from her, there was almost relief in his own despair; in feeling it to the full; in seeing the heartlessness of thought wither in the fierce flame of his agony.

It seemed to him that he had never before known what it was to love. It was as if he were more her than himself. He relived her life and its sorrows. He relived her miserable married years, the long loneliness, parted from her child, her terror of the final parting, coming so cruelly upon them; and he lived the pains of her dissolution. He understood as he had never understood, all that she was and felt; he yearned as he had never yearned, to hold and keep her with him in joy and security; he suffered as he had never suffered.

Such passionate rebellion filled him that he would walk for hours about the country, while merciful anesthetics gave her oblivion, in a blind rage of mere feeling—feeling at a white heat, a core of tormented life. And the worst was that her life of martyrdom was not to be crowned by a martyr’s happy death; the worst was that her own light died away from before her feet, that she groped in darkness, and that, since he was to lose her, he might not even have her to the end.

For months he watched the slow fading of all that had made her herself, her relapse into the instinctive, almost into the animal. Her lips, for many days, kept the courage of their smile, but it was at last only an automatic courage, showing no sweetness, no caress. Her eyes, in the first tragic joy of their reunion, had longed, grieved, yearned over the son who hid his sorrow for her sake. Afterward, all feeling, except a sort of chill resentment, died from her look. For the last days of her life, when, in great anguish, she never spoke at all, these eyes would turn on him with a strange immensity of indifference. It was as if already his mother were gone and as if a ghost had stolen into his life. She died at last, after a long night of unconsciousness, without a word or look that brought them near.

Gavan lived through all that followed in a stupor.

On the day of her funeral, when all was over, he walked out into the spring woods.

The day was sweet and mild. Pools of shallow water shone here and there in the hollows, among the slender tree-stems. Pale slips of blue were seen among the fine, gray branches, and pushing up from last year’s leaves were snowdrops growing everywhere, white and green among the russet leaves, lovely, lovely snowdrops. Seeing them, in his swift, aimless wandering, Gavan paused.

The long nights and days had worn him to that last stage of exhaustion where every sense is stretched fine and sharp as the highest string of a musical instrument. Leaning against a tree, his arms folded, he looked at the snowdrops, at their vivid green, and their white, as fresh, as delicate as flakes of newly fallen snow.

“Lovely, lovely,” he said, and, looking all about him, at the fretwork of gray branches on the blue, the pale, shining water,—a little bird just hopping to its edge among the shorter grass to drink,—he repeated, “Lovely,” while the anguish in his heart and the sweet beauty without combined in the sharp, exquisite tension of a mood about to snap, the fineness of a note, unendurably high, held to an unendurable length.

A dimness overtook him: as if the note, no longer keenly singing, sank to an insect-like buzz, a chaos of minute, whirring vibrations that made a queer, dizzy rhythm; and, in a daze of sudden indifference, both to beauty and anguish, he seemed to see himself standing there, collapsed against the tree, his frail figure outworn with misery,—to see himself, and the trees, the pools of water, the drinking bird, and the snowy flowers,—like a picture held before calm, dying eyes.

“Yes,” he thought, “she saw it like this,—me, herself, life; that is why she didn’t care any longer.”

He continued to look, and from the dimness and the buzzing the calm grew clear—clear as a sharply cut hallucination. He knew the experience, he had often before known it; but he had never yet felt it so unutterably, so finally. Something in him had done struggling forever; something was relinquished; he had accepted something. “Yes, it is like that,” he thought on; “they are all of them right.”

With the cold eye of contemplation he gazed on the illusion of life: joy, suffering, beauty, good and evil. His individual life, enfranchised from its dream of a separate self, drifted into the life about him. He was part of it all; in him, as in those other freed ones, the self suddenly knew itself as fleeting and unsubstantial as a dream, knew its own profound irrationality and the suffering that its striving to be must always mean.

He was perfectly at peace, he who had never known peace. “I am as dead as she is,” he thought.

In his peace he was conscious of no emotion, yet he found himself suddenly leaning his head against the tree and weeping. He wept, but he knew that it was no longer with grief or longing. He watched the exhausted machine give way, and noted its piteous desolation of attitude,—not pitying it,—while he thought, “I shall feel, perhaps suffer, perhaps enjoy again; but I shall always watch myself from above it all.”

The mystic experience had come overwhelmingly to him and his mind was never to lose the effect of that immediacy of consciousness, untransmissible, unspeakable, ineffaceable. And that with which he found himself one was far from any human thoughts or emotions; rather it was the negation of them, the infinite negation of finite restlessness.

He went back to the house, to the darkened, empty room. The memories that crowded there, of pity and love and terror, were now part of the picture he looked at, as near and yet as far, as the vision of the snowdrops, the bird, and the spring sky.

All was quiet. She was gone as he would go. The laboring breath was stilled forever.

II

GAVAN did not address himself to an ascetic remodeling of his life. He pursued the path traced out before him. He yielded placidly to the calls of life, willing to work, to accomplish, willing even to indulge his passions, since there could lurk for him no trap among the shows of life. His taste soon drew back, disdainful and delicate, from his experience of youthful dissipation; his ironic indifference made him deaf to the lures of ambition; but he was an accurate and steady worker and a tolerably interested observer of existence.

As he had ceased to have value for himself, so others had no value in his eyes. Social effort and self-realization were, as ideals, equally meaningless to him; and though pity was always with him, it was a pity gentle and meditative, hopeless of alleviation: for suffering was life, and to cure one, one must abolish the other. Material remedies seemed to him worse than useless; they merely renewed the craving forces. The Imitation of Christ was a fitter panacea than organized charities and progressive legislation.

Physical pain in the helpless, the dumbly conscious, in children or animals, hurt him and made him know that he, too, lived; and he would spend himself to give relief to any suffering thing. He sought no further in metaphysical systems; he desired no further insight. Now and then, finding their pensive pastures pleasant, he would read some Hindoo or medieval mystic; but ecstasies were as alien to him as materialism: both were curious forms of self-deception—one the inflation of the illusory self into the loss of any sense of relation, and the other the self’s painful concentration into imbecilely selfish aims. The people most pleasing to him were the people who, without self-doubt and without self-consciousness, performed some inherited function in the state; the simply great in life; or those who, by natural gift, the fortunately finished, the inevitably distinguished, followed some beautifully complex calling. The mediocre and the pretentious were unpleasing phenomena, and the ideals of democracy mere barbarous nonsense.

His own pursuits were those of a fashionable and ambitious man, and, to the casual observer, the utter absence of any of the pose of disillusionized youth made all the more apparent what seemed to be a man of the world cynicism. Those who knew him better found him charming and perplexing. He seemed to have no barriers, yet one could not come near him. His center receded before pursuit. And he was much pursued. He aroused conjecture, interest, attachment. His exquisite head, the chill sweetness of his manner, the strange, piercing charm of his smile, drew eyes and hearts to him. Idly amused, he saw himself, all inert, boosted from step to step, saw friends swarm about him and hardly an enemy’s face.

It was rare for him to meet dislike. One young man, vaguely known at Oxford, noticed with interest as a relative of Eppie’s, he had, indeed, by merely being, it seemed, antagonized. Gavan had really felt something of a shy, derivative affection for this Jim Grainger, a dogged, sullen, strenuous youth; because of the dear old memory, he had made one or two delicate, diffident approaches—approaches repulsed with bull-dog defiance. Gavan, who understood most things, quite understood that to the serious, the plain, the obviously laborious son of an impecunious barrister, he might have given the impression, so funnily erroneous, of a sauntering dilettantism, an aristocratic flÂnerie. At all events, Grainger was intrenched in a resolute disapproval, colored, perhaps, with some tinge of reminiscent childish jealousy. When their paths again crossed in London and Gavan found his suavity encountered by an even more scowling sarcasm, jealousy, of another type, was an obvious cause. Grainger, scornful of social dexterities and weapons, had worked himself to skin and bone in preparation for a career, and a career that he intended to be of serious significance. And at its outset he found himself in apparent competition with Gavan for a post that, significant indeed to him, as the first rung on the political ladder, could only be decorative to his rival—the post of secretary to a prominent cabinet-minister. Grainger had his justified hopes, and he was, except for outward graces, absolutely fitted for the place.

In his path he found the listless figure of the well-remembered and heartily disliked Gavan—a gilded youth, pure and simple, and as such being lifted, by all accounts, onto the coveted rung of the coveted ladder. Gavan’s scholarly fitness for the post Grainger only half credited. Of the sturdy professional class, with a streak of the easily suspicious bourgeois about him, he was glad to believe tales of drawing-room influence. He expressed himself with disgusted openness as to the fatal effect of a type like Palairet’s on public life. Gavan heard a little and guessed more. He found himself sympathizing with Grainger; he had always liked him. With an effort that he had never used on his own behalf, he managed to get him fitted into the pair of shoes that were standing waiting for his own feet. It had been, indeed, though in superficial ways, an affair of drawing-room influence. The wife of the great statesman, as well as that high personage himself, was one of Gavan’s devoted and baffled friends. She said that he made her think of a half-frozen bird that one longed to take in one’s hands and warm, and she hopefully communed with her husband as to the invigorating effect of a career upon him. She suspected Gavan—his influence over her husband—when she found that an alien candidate was being foisted upon her.

“Grainger!” she exclaimed, vexed and incredulous. “Why Grainger? Why not anybody as well as Grainger? Yes, I’ve seen the young man. He looks like a pugilistic Broad-Church parson. All he wants is to climb and to reform everything.”

“Exactly the type for British politics,” Gavan rejoined. “He is in earnest about politics, and I’m not; you know I’m not.” His friend helplessly owned that he was exasperating. Grainger, had he known to whom he was indebted for his lift, would have felt, perhaps, a heightened wrath against “drawing-room influence.”

Happily and justifiably unconscious, he proceeded to climb.

Meanwhile another pair of shoes was swiftly found for Gavan. He went out to India as secretary to the viceroy.

Here, in the surroundings of his early youth, the second great moral upheaval of his life came to him. Three years had passed since his mother’s death. He was twenty-six years old.

During a long summer among the mountains of Simla, he met Alice Grafton. She was married, a year older than himself, but a girl still in mind and appearance—fragile, hesitant, exquisite. Gavan at his very first seeing of her felt something knocking in his heart. It seemed like pity, instinctive pity, the bond between him and life, and for some time he deluded himself with this comparatively safe interpretation. He did not quite know why he should pity Mrs. Grafton. That she should look like a girl was hardly a reason, nor that her husband, large, masterful, embossed with decorations, was uninteresting. She had been married to him—by all accounts the phrase applied—at nineteen and could not find him sympathetic; but, after all, many cheerful women were in that situation. He was a kindly, an admiring husband, and her life was set in luxurious beauty. Yet piteousness was there. She was all promise and unfulfilment; and dimly, mutely, she seemed to feel that the promise would never be fulfilled, as though a too-early primrose smiled wistfully through a veil of ice. Should she never become consciously unhappy that would be but another symptom of permanent immaturity.

Gavan rode with her and talked with her, and read with her in her fresh, flower-filled drawing-room. Their tastes were not at all alike; but he did not in the least mind that when she lifted her lovely eyes to him over poor poetry; and when she played and sang to him her very ineffectuality added a pathos, full of charm, to the obvious ballads that she liked. It was sweet, too, and endearing, to watch her, by degrees, molding her taste to his until it became a delightful and intuitive echo.

He almost wondered if it was also in echo that she began to feel for herself his own appreciation of her. Certainly she matured to consciousness of lack. She began to confide; not with an open frankness, but vaguely, as though she groped toward the causes of her sadness. She shrank, and knew now why she shrank, when her loud-voiced, cheerful husband came tramping into the room. Then she began to see that she was horribly lonely. Unconsciously, in the confidences now, she plead for help, for reassurance. She probed him constantly as to religious hopes and the real significance of life. Her soft voice, with its endearing little stammer, grew to Gavan nearer and dearer than all the voices of the world. At first it appealed, and then it possessed him. He had thought that what he felt for her was only pity. He had thought himself too dead to all earthly pangs for the rudimentary one of love to reach him. But when, one day, he found her weeping, alone, among her flowers, he took her into his arms and the great illusion seized him once more.

It seized him, though he knew it for illusion. He laughed at the specter of nothingness and gloried in the beauty of the rainbow moment. This human creature needed him and he her: that was, for them, the only reality; who cared for the blank background where their lives flashed and vanished? The flash was what mattered. He sprang from the dead self, as from a tomb, when he kissed her lips. Life might mean sorrow and defeat, but its tragedy was atoned for by a moment of such joy.

“Gavan, Gavan, do we love each other? Do we?” she wept.

He saw illusion and joy where her woman’s heart felt only reality and terror in the joy.

They obviously loved each other, though it was without a word of love that they found themselves in each other’s arms. Had ever two beings so lonely so needed love? Her sweet, stunned eyes were a rapture of awakening to him, and though, under all, ran the deep, buried river of knowledge, whispering forever, “Vanity of vanities,” he was far above it in the sunlight of the upper air. He felt himself, knew himself only as the longing to look forever into her eyes, to hold her to him forever. That, on the day of awakening, seemed all that life meant.

Later on he found that more fundamental things had clutched him through the broken barriers of thought—jealousies and desires that showed him his partaking of the common life of humanity.

Gavan’s skepticism had not come face to face with a moral test as yet, and he could but contemplate curiously in himself the strong, instinctive revolt of all the man of hereditary custom and conscience from any dishonorable form of illegal love. He couldn’t justify it, but it was there, as strong as his longing for the woman.

It was not that he cared a rap, so he analyzed it, for laws or conventions: it was merely that he could not do anything that he felt as dishonorable.

He told Alice that she must leave her husband and come openly to him. They would go back to Europe; live in Italy—the land of happy outcasts from unhappy forms; there they would study and travel and make beauty grow about them. Holding her hands gently, he put it all before her with a reverent devotion that gave the proposal a matrimonial dignity.

“You know me well enough, dear Alice,” he said, “to know that you need fear none of the usual dangers in such cases. I don’t care about anything but you; I never will—ambition, country, family. Nothing outside me, or inside me, could make me fail you. All I want, or shall ever want, is to make you happy, and to be happy with you.”

But the things he put away as meaningless dreams the poor woman with the girl’s mind saw as grim realities. It was easy for Gavan to barter a mirage for the one thing he cared to have; the world was not a mirage to her, and even her love could not make it so. Her thin young nature knew only the craving to keep and not the revulsion from a hidden wrong. Every fiber in her shrank from the facing of a hostile order of things, the bearing through life of a public dishonor. It was as if it were he who purposed the worse disgrace, not she.

She wept and wept in his arms, hoping, perhaps, to weaken him by her feebleness and her abandonment, so that an open avowal of cowardice, an open appeal that he should yield to it, might be needless; but at last, since he would not speak, only stroking her hair, her hand, sharing her sorrow, she moaned out, “Oh, Gavan, I can’t, I can’t.”

He only half understood, feeling his heart freeze in the renunciation that she might demand. But when she sobbed on brokenly, “Don’t leave me. Stay with me. I can’t live without you. No one need ever know,” he understood.

Standing white and motionless, it was he now who repeated, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

She wept on, incredulous, supplicating, reproachful. “You will not leave me! You will not abandon me!”

“I cannot—stay with you.”

“You win my heart—humiliate me,—see that I’m yours—only yours,—and then cast me off!”

“Don’t speak so cruelly, Alice. Cast you off? I, who only pray you to let me take you with me?”

“A target for the world!”

“Darling, poor darling, I know that I ask all—all; but what else is there—unless I leave you?”

She hid her face on his shoulder, sobbing miserably, her sobs her only answer, and to it he rejoined: “We can’t go on, you know that; and to stay, to deceive your husband, to drag you through all the baseness, the ugliness, the degradation, Alice, of a hidden intrigue—I can’t do that; it’s the only thing I can’t do for you.”

“You despise me; you think me wicked—because I can’t have such horrible courage. I think what you ask is more wicked; I think it hurts everybody more; I think that it would degrade us more. People can’t live like that—cut off from everything—and not be degraded in the end.”

It was a new species of torture that now tore at Gavan’s heart and mind. He saw too clearly the force of the arguments that underlay her specious appeal—more clearly, far, than she could see. It was horribly true that the life of happy outlawry he proposed might wither and debase more than a conscious sin. The organized, crafty wisdom of life was on her side. And on his was a mere matter of taste. He could find no sanction for his resistance to her and to himself except in that instinctive recoil from what he felt as dishonor. He was sacrificing them both to a silly, subjective figment. The lurid realization, that burned and froze, went through him, and with it the unanswerable necessity. He must, he must, sacrifice them. And he must talk the language of right and wrong as though he believed in it. He acted as if he did, yet nothing was further from him than such belief; that was the strange agony that wrenched his brain as he said: “You are blind, not wicked. Some day you will thank me if I make it possible for you to let me go.” And, he too incredulous, he cried, “Alice, Alice, will you really let me go without you?”

She would not consent to the final alternative, and the struggle lasted for a week, through their daily meetings—the dream-like, deft meetings under the eyes of others,—and while they rode alone over the hills—long, sad rides, when both, often in a moody silence, showed at once their hope and their resistance.

Her fear won at last. “And I can’t even pretend that it’s goodness,” she said, her voice trembling with self-scorn. “You’ve abased me to the dust, Gavan. Yes, it’s true, if you like—my fear is greater than my love.” Irony, a half-felt anger, helped her to bear the blow, for, to the end, she could not believe that he would find strength to leave her.

The parting came suddenly. Wringing her hands, looking hard into her face, where he saw still a fawning hope and a half-stupefied despair, he left her, and felt that he had torn his heart up by the very roots.

And he had sacrificed her and himself, to what? Gavan could ask himself the question at leisure during the following year.

Yet, from the irrational sacrifice was born a timid, trembling trust, a dim hope that the unbannered combat had not been in vain, that even the blind holding to the ambiguous right might blossom in a better life for her than if he had taken the joy held out to him. The trust was as irrational as the sacrifice, but it was dear to him. He cherished it, and it fluttered in him, sweet, intangible, during all the desolate year. Then, at the year’s end, he met Alice, suddenly, unexpectedly, and found her ominously changed. Her girlhood was gone. A hard, glittering surface, competent, resourceful, hid something.

The strength of his renouncement was so rooted that he felt no personal fear, and for her, too, he no longer felt fear in his nearness. What he felt was a new pity—a pity suffocating and horrible. Whispers of discreet scandal enlightened him. Alice was in no danger of what she most shrank from—a public pillory; but she was among those of whom the world whispers, with a half-condoning smile and shrug.

Gavan saw her riding one morning with a famous soldier, a Nietzschian type of strength, splendor, and high indifference. And now he understood all. He knew the man. He was one who would have stared light irony at Gavan’s chivalrous willingness to sacrifice his life to a woman; to such a charming triviality as an intrigue he would sacrifice just enough and no more. He knew the rules of the game and with him Alice was safe from any open pillory. People would never do more than whisper.

A bitter daylight flooded for Gavan that sweet, false dawn, and once again the cruelty, the caprice at the heart of all things were revealed to him. He knew the flame of impotent remorse. He had tossed the miserable child to this fate, and though remorse, like all else, was meaningless, he loathed himself for his futile, empty magnanimity.

She had seen his eyes upon her as she rode. She sent for him, and, alone with him, the glitter, the hardness, broke to dreadful despair.

She confessed all at his knees. Hardness and glitter had been the shield of the racked, terror-stricken heart. The girl was a woman and knew the use of shields.

“And Gavan, Gavan, worst of all,—far worst,—I don’t love him; I never loved him. It was simply—simply”—she could hardly speak—“that he frightened and flattered me. It was vanity—recklessness—I don’t know what it was.”

After the confession, she waited, her face hidden, for his reproach or anger. Neither came. Instead, she felt, in the long silence, that something quiet enveloped her.

She looked up to see his eyes far from her.

“Gavan, can you forgive me?” she whispered.

Once more he was looking at it all—all the cruel, the meaningless drama in which he had been enmeshed for a little while. Once more his thought had risen far above it, and the old peace, the old, dead peace, with no trembling of the hopes that meant only a deeper delusion, was regained. He knew how deep must be the reattained tranquillity, when, the woman he had loved at his feet, he felt no shrinking, no reproach, no desire, only an immense, an indifferent pity.

“Forgive you, Alice? Poor, poor Alice. Perhaps you should forgive me; but it isn’t a question of that. Don’t cry; don’t cry,” he repeated mechanically, gently stroking her hair—hair whose profuse, wonderful gold he had once kissed with a lover’s awed delight.

“You forgive me—you do forgive me, Gavan?”

“It isn’t a question of forgiveness; but of course I forgive you, dear Alice.”

“Gavan, tell me that you love me still. Can you love me? Oh, say that I haven’t lost that.”

He did not reply, looking away and lifting his hand from her hair.

The woman, leaning on his knees, felt a stealing sense of awe, worse than any fear of his anger. And worse than a vehement disavowal of love, worse than a spurning of her from him, were his words: “I want you not to suffer, dear Alice; I want you to find peace.”

“Peace! What peace can I find?”

He looked at her now, wondering if she would understand and willing to put it before her as he himself saw it: “The peace of seeing it all, and letting it all go.”

“Gavan, I swear to you that I will never see him again. Oh, Gavan, what do you mean? If you would forgive me—really forgive me—and take me now, I would follow you anywhere. I am not afraid any longer. I have found out that the only thing to be afraid of is oneself. If I have you, nothing else matters.”

He looked steadily at her, no longer touching her. “You have said what I mean. You have found it out. The only thing to be afraid of is ourselves. You will not see this man again? You will keep that promise to me?”

“Any promise! Anything you ask! And, indeed, indeed, I could not see him now,” she shuddered. “Gavan, you will take me away with you?”

He wondered at her that she did not see how far he was from her—how far, and yet how one with her, how merged in her through his comprehension of the essential unity that bound all life together, that made her suffering part of him, even while he looked down upon it from an almost musing height.

He felt unutterable gentleness and unutterable ruthlessness. “I don’t mean that, Alice. You won’t lose yourself by clinging to me, by clinging to what you want.”

“You don’t love me! Oh, you don’t love me! I have killed your love!” she wailed out, rising to her feet, pierced by her full realization. She stepped back from him to gaze at him with a sort of horror. “You talk as if you had become a priest.”

He appreciated what his attitude must seem to her—priestly indeed, almost sleek in its lack of personal emotion, its trite recourse to the preaching of renunciation. And, almost with a sense of humor, that he felt as hateful at such a moment, the perception came that he might serve her through the very erroneousness of her seeing of him. The sense of humor was hateful, and his skilful seizing of her suggestion had a grotesque aspect as well. Even in his weariness, he was aware that the cup of contemplation was full when it could hold its drop of realized irony.

“I think that I have become a priest, Alice,” he said. “I see everything differently. And weren’t you brought up in a religious way—to go to church, seek props, say your prayers, sacrifice yourself and live for others? Can’t you take hold of that again? It’s the only way.”

Her quick flaming was justified, he knew; one shouldn’t speak of help when one was so far away; he had exaggerated the sacerdotal note. “Oh, you despise me! It is because of that, and you are trying to hide it from me! What is religion to me, what is anything—anything in the world to me—if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.

He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more human tone. “You are not wicked—no more—no less—than any one. I don’t despise you. Believe me, Alice. If I hadn’t changed, this would have drawn me to you; I should have felt a deeper tenderness because you needed me more. But think of me as a priest: I have changed as much as that. And remember that what you have yourself found out is true—the only thing to be afraid of is oneself, and the only escape from fear is to—is to”—he paused, hearing the triteness of his own words and wondering with a new wonder at their truth, their gray antiquity, their ever-verdant youth—“is to renounce,” he finished.

He was standing now, ready for departure. In her eyes he saw at last the dignity of hopelessness, of an accepted doom, a pain far above panic.

“Dear Alice,” he said, taking her hand—“dear Alice.” And, with all the delicacy of his shrinking from a too great directness, his eyes had a steadiness of demand that sank into the poor woman’s tossed, unstable soul, he added, “Don’t ever do anything ugly—or foolish—again.”

Her lover lost,—the very slightness of the words “ugly,” “foolish,” told her how utterly lost,—a deep thrill of emotional exaltation went through the emptiness he left. She longed to clasp the lost lover and to sink at the knees of the priest.

“I will be good. I will renounce myself,” she said, as though it were a creed before an altar; and hurriedly she whispered, poor child, “Perhaps in heaven—we will find each other.”

Gavan often thought of that pathetic human clutch. So was the dream of an atoning heaven built. It kept its pathos, even its beauty, for him, when the whole tale ended in the world’s shrug and smile. He heard first that Alice had become an emotionally devout churchwoman;—that lasted for a year;—and then, alas! alas!—but, after all, the smile and shrug was the best philosophy,—that she rode once more with the Nietzschian lover. He had one short note from her: he would have heard—perhaps, at any rate, he would know what to think when he did hear that she saw the man again. And she wanted him to know from her that it was not as he might think: she really loved him now—the other; not as she had loved Gavan,—that would always be first,—but very much; and she needed love, she must have it in her life, and she was lifting this man who loved her, was helping his life, and she had broader views now and did not believe in creeds or in the shibboleths that guided the vulgar. And she was harming no one, no one knew. Life was far too complicated, the intricacies of modern civilization far too enmeshing, for duty to be seen in plain black and white. The whole question of marriage was an open one, and one had a right to interpret one’s duty according to one’s own lights. Gavan saw the hand of the new master through it all. Shortly after, the death of Alice’s husband, killed while tiger-shooting, set her free, and the new master proved himself at all events a fond one by promptly marrying her. So ended Alice in his life.

There was not much more to look back on after that. His return to England; his entering the political arena, with neither desire nor reluctance; his standing for the town his uncle’s influence marked out for him; the fight and the very gallant failure,—there had been, for him, an amused interest in the game of it all. The last year he had spent in his Surrey home, usually in company with a really pathetic effigy of the past—his father, poor and broken in health, the old serpent of Gavan’s childhood basking now in torpid insignificance, its fangs drawn.

People probably thought that he had been soured by an initial defeat. Gavan knew that the game had merely ceased to amuse him. What amused him most was concentrated and accurate scholarship. He was writing a book on some of the obscurer phases of religious enthusiasm, studying from a historical and psychological point of view the origin and formation of queer little sects,—failures in the struggle for survival,—their brief, ambiguous triumphs and their disintegrations.

His unruffled stepping-back from the arena of political activity was to the more congenial activity of understanding and observation. But there burned in him none of the observer’s, the thinker’s passion. He worked as he rode or ate his breakfast. Work was part of the necessary fuel that kept life’s flame bright. While he lived he didn’t want a feeble, flickering flame. But at his heart, he was profoundly indifferent to work, as to all else.

GAVAN’S mind, as he leaned back in the railway carriage, had passed over the visual aspect of this long retrospect, not in meditation, but in a passive seeing of its scenes and faces. Eppie’s face, fading in the mist; Robbie, silhouetted on the sky; the sulky Grainger; his uncle; his mother, and the vision of the spring day where he had wandered in the old dream of pain and into its cessation; finally, Alice, her pale hair and wistful eyes and her look when, at parting, she had said that they might be together in heaven.

He had rarely known a greater lucidity than in those swift, lonely hours of night. It was like a queer, long pause between a past accomplished and a future not yet begun—as though one should sunder time and stand between its cloven waves. The figures crossed the stage, and he seemed to see them all in the infinite leisure of an eternal moment.

This future, its figures just about to emerge from the wings into full view, slightly troubled his reverie. It was at dawn that his mind again turned to it with a conjecture half amused and half reluctant. There was something disturbing in the linkage he must make between that child’s face on the mist and the Miss Gifford he was so soon to see. That she would, at all events in her own conception, dominate the stage, he felt sure; she might even expect a special attention from a spectator whose memory could join hers in that far first act. He was pretty sure that his memory would have to do service for both; and quite sure that memory would not hold for her, as it did for him, a distinct tincture of pain, of restlessness, as though there strove in it something shackled and unfulfilled.

One’s thoughts, at four o’clock in the morning, after hours of sleeplessness, became fantastic, and Gavan found himself watching, with some shrinking, this image of the past, suddenly released, brought gasping and half stupefied to the air, to freedom, to new, strong activity, after having been, for so long, bound and gagged and thrust into an underground prison.

He turned to a forecast of what Eppie would probably be like. He had heard a good deal about her, and he had not cared for what he had heard. The fact that one did hear a good deal was not pleasing. Every one, in describing her, used the word charming; he had gathered that it meant, as applied to her, more than mere prettiness, wit, or social deftness; and it was precisely for the more that it meant that he did not care.

Apparently what really distinguished her was her energy. She traveled with her cousin, Lady Alicia Waring, a worldly, kindly dabbler in art and politics; she rushed from country-house to country-house; she worked in the slums; she sat on committees; she canvassed for parliamentary friends; she hunted, she yachted, she sang, she broke hearts, and, by all accounts, had high and resolute matrimonial ambitions. Would Eppie Gifford “get” So-and-so was a question that Gavan had heard more than once repeated, with the graceless terseness of our modern colloquialism, and it spoke much for Eppie’s popularity that it was usually asked in sympathy.

This reputation for a direct and vigorous worldliness was only thrown into more pungent relief by the startling tale of her love-affair. She had fallen in love, helplessly in love, with an impecunious younger son, an officer in the Guards—a lazy, lovable, petulant nobody, the last type one would have expected her to lose her head over. He was not stupid, but he didn’t count and never would. The match would have been a reckless one, for Eppie had, practically, only enough to pay for her clothes and her traveling expenses. The handsome guardsman had not even prospects. Yet, deliberately sacrificing all her chances, she had fallen in love, been radiantly engaged, and then, from the radiance, flung into stupefying humiliation. He had thrown her over, quite openly, for an ugly little heiress from Liverpool. Poor Eppie had carried off her broken heart—and she didn’t deny that it was broken—for a year or so of travel. This had happened four years ago. She had mended as bravely as possible,—it wasn’t a deep break after all,—and on the thrilling occasion of her first meeting with the faithless lover and his bride was magnificently sweet and regal to the ugly heiress. It was surmised that the husband was as uncomfortable as he deserved to be. But this capacity for recklessness, this picture of one so dauntless, dazed and discomfited, hardly redeemed the other, the probably fundamental aspect. She had lost her head; but that didn’t prove that when she had it she would not make the best possible use of it. There was talk now—Eppie’s was the publicity of popularity—of Gavan’s old-time rival, Grainger, who had inherited an immense fortune and, unvarnished and defiantly undecorative on his lustrous background, was one of the world’s prizes. All that he had was at Eppie’s feet, and some more brilliant alternative could be the only cause for hesitation in a young woman seared by misfortune and cured forever of folly.

So the talk went, and Gavan took such gabble with a large pinch of ironic incredulity; but at the same time the gossip left its trail. The impetuous and devastating young lady, with her assurance and her aim at large successes, was to him a distasteful figure. There was pain in linking it with little Eppie. It stood waiting in the wings and was altogether novel and a little menacing to one’s peace of mind. He really did not want to see Miss Gilford; she belonged to a modern type intensely wearisome to him. But she was staying with her uncle and aunt—only Miss Barbara was left—at Kirklands, and the general, after a meeting in London, had written begging him to pay them all a visit, and, since there had seemed no reason for not going, here he was.

Here he was, and round the corner of the wing the new Eppie stood waiting. Poor little Eppie of childhood—she was lost forever.

But all the clearness of the night concentrated, at dawn, into that vivid memory of the past where they had wandered together, sharing joy and sorrow.

That was long, long over. To-morrow was already here, and to-morrow belonged to the new Eppie.

III

GAVAN spent the morning in Edinburgh, seeing an old relative, and reached Kirklands at six.

It was a cold October evening, the moors like a dark, sullenly heaving ocean and a heavy bar of sunset lying along the horizon.

The windows of the old white house mirrored the dying color, and here and there the inner light of fire and candle seemed like laughter on a grave face. With all its loneliness it was a happy-looking house; he remembered that; and in the stillness of the vast moors and the coming night it made him think of a warmly throbbing heart filling with courage and significance a desolate life.

The general came from the long oak library, book in hand, to welcome him. Gavan was almost automatically observant of physical processes and noted now the pronounced limp, the touch of garrulity—symptoms of the fine old organism’s placid disintegration. Life was leaving it unreluctantly, and the mild indifference of age made his cordiality at once warmer and more impersonal than of old.

As he led Gavan to his room, the room of boyhood, near Eppie’s, overlooking the garden and the wooded hills, he told him that Eppie and Miss Barbara were dressing and that he would have time for a talk with them before dinner at eight.

“It’s changed since you were here, Gavan. Ah! time goes—it goes. Poor Rachel! we lost her five years ago. If Eppie didn’t look after us so well we should be lonely, Barbara and I. We seldom get away now. Too old to care for change. But Eppie always gives us three or four months, and a letter once a week while she’s away. She puts us first. This is home, she says. She sees clever people at Alicia Waring’s, has the world at her feet,—you’ve heard, no doubt,—but she loves Kirklands best. She gardens with me—a great gardener Eppie, but she is good at anything she sets herself to; she drives her aunt about, she reads to us and sings to us,—you have heard of her singing, too,—keeps us in touch with life. Eppie is a wonderful person for sharing happiness,” the general monologued, looking about the fire-lit room; and Gavan felt that, from this point of view, some of the little Eppie might still have survived.

“So you have given up the idea of the House?” the general went on.

“I’m no good at it,” said Gavan; “I’ve proved it.”

“Proved it? Nonsense. Wait till you are fifty before saying that. Why, you’ve everything in your favor. You weren’t enough in earnest; that was the trouble. You didn’t care enough; you played into your opponents’ hands. The British public doesn’t understand idealism or irony. Eppie told us all about it.”

“Eppie? How did Eppie know?” He found himself using her little name as a matter of course.

“She knows everything,” the general rejoined, with his air of happy, derived complacency; “even when she’s not in England, she never loses touch. Eppie is very much behind the scenes.”

The simile recalled to Gavan his own vision of the stage and the waiting figure. “Even behind my scenes!” he ejaculated, smiling at so much omniscience.

“From the moment you came into public life, yes.”

“And she knows why I failed at it? Idealism and irony?”

“That’s what she says; and I usually find Eppie right.” The general, after the half-humorous declaration, had a pause, and before leaving his guest, he added, “Right, except about her own affairs. She is a child there yet.”

Eppie’s disaster must have been keenly felt and keenly resented at Kirklands. The general made no further reference to it and Gavan asked no question.

There was a fire, a lamp, and several clusters of candles in the long, dark library when Gavan entered it an hour later, so that the darkness was full of light; yet he had wandered slowly down its length, looking about him at the faded tan, russet, and gilt of well-remembered books, at the massive chairs and tables, all in their old places, all so intimately familiar, before seeing that he was not alone in the room.

Some one in white was sitting, half submerged in a deep chair, behind the table with its lamp—some one who had been watching him as he wandered, and who now rose to meet him, taking him so unawares that she startled him, all the light in the dim room seeming suddenly to center upon her and she herself to throw everything, even his former thoughts of her, into the background.

It was Eppie, of course, and all that he had heard of her, all that he had conjectured, fell back before the impression that held him in a moment, long, really dazzled, yet very acute.

Her face was narrow, pale, faintly freckled; the jaw long, the nose high-bridged, the lips a little prominent; and, as he now saw, a clear flush sprang easily to her cheeks. Eyes, lips, and hair were vivid with color: the hair, with its remembered rivulets of russet and gold, piled high on her head, framing the narrow face and the long throat; the eyes gray or green or gold, like the depths of a mountain stream.

He had heard many analogies for the haunting and fugitive charm of Miss Gifford’s face—a charm that could only, apparently, be caught with the subtleties of antithesis. One appreciator had said that she was like an angelic jockey; another, that with a statesman’s gaze she had a baby’s smile; another, that she was a Flying Victory done by Velasquez. And with his own dominant impression of strength, sweetness, and daring, there crowded other similes. Her eyes had the steeplechaser’s hard, smiling scrutiny of the next jump; the halloo of the hunt under a morning sky was in them, the joyous shouts of Spartan boys at play; yet, though eyes of heroism and laughter, they were eyes sad and almost tragically benignant.

She was tall, with the spare lightness of a runner poised for a race, and the firm, ample breast of a hardy nymph. She suggested these pagan, outdoor similes while, at the same time, luxuriously feminine in her more than fashionable aspect, the last touches of modernity were upon her: her dress, the eighteenth-century, interpreted by Paris, her decorations all discretion and distinction—a knot of silver-green at her breast, an emerald ring on her finger, and emerald earrings, two drops of smooth, green light, trembling in the shadows of her hair.

Altogether Gavan was able to grasp the impression even further, to simplify it, to express at once its dazzled quality and its acuteness, as various and almost violent, as if, suddenly, every instrument in an orchestra were to strike one long, clear, vibrating note.

His gaze had been prolonged, and hers had answered it with as open an intentness. And it was at last she who took both his hands, shook them a little, holding them while, not shyly, but with that vivid flush on her cheek, “You,” she said.

For she was startled, too. It was he. She remembered, as if she had seen them yesterday, his air of quick response, surface-shrinking, deep composure, the old delicious smile, and the glance swiftly looking and swiftly averted.

“And you,” Gavan repeated. “I haven’t changed so much, though,” he said.

“And I have? Really much? Long skirts and turned up hair are a transformation. It’s wonderful to see you, Gavan. It makes one get hold of the past and of oneself in it.”

“Does it?”

“Doesn’t it?” She let go his hands, and moving to the fire and standing before it while she surveyed him, she went on, not waiting for an answer:

“But I don’t suppose that you have my keenness of memory. It all rushes back—our walks, our games, our lessons, the smell of the heather, the very taste of the heather-honey we ate at tea, and all the things you did and said and looked; your building the Petit Trianon, and your playing dolls with me that day; your Agnes, in her pink dress, and my Elspeth, whom I used to whip so.”

“I remember it all,” said Gavan, “and I remember how I broke poor Elspeth.”

“Do you?”

“All of it: the attic windows and the pine-tree under them, and the great white bird, and the dreadful, soft little thud on the garden path.”

“Yes, I can see your face looking down. You were quite silent and frozen. I screamed and screamed. Aunt Barbara thought that you had fallen at first from the way I screamed.”

“Poor little Eppie. Yes, I remember; it was horrid.”

Their eyes, smiling, quizzical, yet sad, watched, measured each other, while they exchanged these trophies from the past. He had joined her beside the fire, and, turning, she leaned her hands on the mantel and looked into the flames. So looking, her face had its aspect of almost tragic brooding. It was as if, Gavan thought, under the light memories, all those visions of his night were there before her, as if, astonishingly, and in almost uncanny measure, she shared them.

“And do you remember Robbie?” she asked presently.

“I was just thinking of Robbie,” Gavan answered. It was her face that had brought back the old sorrow, and that memory, more than any, linked them over all that was new and strange. They glanced at each other.

“I am so glad,” said Eppie.

“Because I remember?”

“Yes, that you haven’t forgotten. You said you would.”

“Did I?” he asked, though he quite remembered that, too.

“Yes; and I should have felt Robbie more dead if you had forgotten him.”

This was wonderfully not the Miss Gifford, and wonderfully the old Eppie. She saw that thought, too, answering it with, “Things haven’t really changed so much, have they? It’s all so very near—all of that.”

So near, that its sudden sharing was making Gavan a little uncomfortable, with the discomfort of the night before justified, intensified.

He hadn’t imagined such familiar closeness with a woman really unknown, nor that, sweeping away all the formalities that might have grown up between them, she should call him Gavan and make it natural for him to call her Eppie. He didn’t really mind. It was amusing, charming perhaps, perhaps even touching—yes, of course it was that; but she was rather out of place: much nearer than where he had imagined she would be, on the stage before him.

Passing to another memory, she now said, “I clung for years, you know, to your promise to come back.”

“I couldn’t come—really and simply could not.”

“I never for a moment thought you could, any more than I thought you could forget Robbie.”

“And when I could come, you were gone.”

“How miserable that made me! I was in Rome when I had the news from Uncle Nigel.”

He felt bound fully to exonerate the past. “I had the life, during my boyhood, of a sumptuous galley-slave. I had everything except liberty and leisure. I was put into a system and left there until it had had its will of me. And when I was free I imagined that you had forgotten all about me. To a shy, warped boy, a grown-up Eppie was an alarming idea.”

“I never thought you had forgotten me!” said Eppie, smiling.

Again she actually disturbed him; but, lightly, he replied with the truth, feeling a certain satisfaction in its lightness: “Never, never; though, of course, you fell into a background. You can’t deny that I did.”

“Oh, no, I don’t deny it.” Her smile met his, seemed placidly to perceive its meaning. She did not for a moment imply, by her admissions, any more than he did; the only question was, What did his admissions imply?

She left them there, going on in an apparent sequence, “Have you heard much about me, Gavan?”

“A good deal,” he owned.

“I ask because I want to pick up threads; I want to know how many stitches are dropped, so to speak. Since you have heard, I want to know just what; I often seem to leave reverberations behind me. Some rather ugly ones, I fear. You heard, perhaps, that I was that rather ambiguous being, the young woman of fashion, materialistic, ambitious, hard.” Her gaze, with its cool scrutiny, was now upon him.

“Those are really too ugly names for what I heard. I gathered, on the whole, that you were merely very vigorous and that you had more opportunities than most people for vigor.”

“I’m glad that you saw it so; but all the same, the truth, at times, hasn’t been beautiful. I have, often, been too indifferent toward people who didn’t count for me, and too diplomatic toward those who did. You see, Gavan,” she put it placidly before him, not at all as if drawing near in confidence,—she was much further in her confidences than in her memories,—but merely as if she unrolled a map before him so that he might clearly see where, at present, they found themselves, “you see, I am a nearly penniless girl—just enough to dress and go about. Of course if I didn’t dress and didn’t go about I could keep body and soul together; but to the shrewd eyes of the world, a girl living on her friends, making capital of her personality, while she seeks a husband who will give her the sort of place she wants—oh, yes, the world isn’t so unfair, either, when one takes off the veils. And this girl, with the personality that pays, was put early in a place from where she could see all sorts of paths at once, see the world, in its ladder aspect, before her—all the horridness of low rungs and all the satisfaction of high ones. I have been tempted through complexity of understanding; perhaps I still am. One wants the best; and when one doesn’t see clearly what the best is, one is in danger of becoming ugly. But echoes are often distorting.”

Miss Gifford was now very fully before him, as she had evidently intended to be. It was as if she herself had drawn between them the barrier of the footlights and as if, on her chosen stage, she swept a really splendid curtsey. And this frank and panoplied young woman of the world was far easier to deal with than the reminiscent Eppie. He could comfortably smile and applaud from his stall, once more the mere spectator—easiest of attitudes.

“The echoes, on the whole, were rather magnificent, as if an Amazon had galloped across mountains and left them calling her prowess from peak to peak.”

Her eyes, quickly on his, seemed to measure the conscious artificiality, to compare it with what he had already, more helplessly, shown her. He felt his rather silly deftness penetrated and that she guessed that the mountain calls had not at all enchanted him. She owned to her own acuteness in her next words:

“And you don’t like young ladies to gallop across mountains. Well, I love galloping, though I’m sorry that I leave over-loud echoes. You, at all events, are noiseless. You seem to have sailed over my head in an air-boat. It was hard for me to keep any trace of you.”

“But I don’t at all mean that I dislike Amazons to have their rides.”

“Let us talk of you now. I have had an eye on you, you know, even when you disappeared into the Indian haze; you had just disappeared when I first came to London. I only heard of lofty things—scholarly distinction, diplomatic grace, exquisite indifference to the world’s prizes and to noisy things in general. It’s all true, I can see.”

“Well, I’m not indifferent to you,” said Gavan, smiling, tossing his appropriate bouquet.

She had at this another, but a sharper, of her penetrative pauses. It was pretty to see her, rather like a deer arrested in its careless speed, suddenly wary, its head high. And, in another moment, he saw that the quick flush, almost violently, sprang to her cheek. Turning her head a little from him, she looked away, almost as if his glib acceptance of a frivolous meaning in her words abashed her—and more for him than for herself; as if she suddenly suspected him of being stupid enough to accept her at the uglier valuation of those echoes he had heard. She had not meant to say that she was one of the world’s prizes, and she had perhaps meant to say, generously, that if he found her noisy she wouldn’t resent indifference. Perhaps she had meant to say nothing of herself at all. She certainly wasn’t on the stage, and in thinking her so he felt that he had shown himself disloyal to something that she, more nobly, had taken for granted. The flush, so vivid, that stayed made him feel himself a blunderer.

But, in a moment, she went on with a lightness of allusion to his speech that yet oddly answered the last turn of his self-reproach. “Oh, you are loyal, I am sure, even to a memory. I wasn’t thinking of particulars, but of universals. My whole impression of you was of something fragrant, elusive, impalpable. I never felt that I had a glimpse of really you. It was almost gross in comparison actually to see your name in the papers, to read of your fight for Camley, to think of you in that earthly scuffle. It was like roast-beef after roses; and I was glad, because I’m gross. I like roast-beef.”

He was grateful to her for the lightness that carried him so kindly over his own blunder.

“It was only the fragrance of the roast, too, you see, since I was defeated,” he said.

“You didn’t mind a bit, did you?”

“It would sound, wouldn’t it, rather like sour grapes to say it?”

“You can say it. It was so obvious that you might have had the bunch by merely stretching out your hand—they were under it, not over your head. You simply wouldn’t play the game.” She left him now, reaching her chair with a long stride and a curving, gleaming turn of her white skirts, suggesting a graceful adaptation of some outdoor dexterity. As she leaned back in her chair, fixing him with that look of cheerful hardness, she made him think so strongly of the resolute, winning type, that almost involuntarily he said, “You would have played it, wouldn’t you?”

“I should think so! I care for the grapes, you see. It’s what I said—you didn’t care enough.”

“Well, it’s kind of you to see ineffectuality in that light.” Still examining the steeplechaser quality, he added, “You do care, don’t you, a lot?”

“Yes, a lot. I am worldly to my finger-tips.” Her eyes challenged him—gaily, not defiantly—to misunderstand her again.

“What do you mean, exactly, by worldly?” he asked.

“I mean by it that I believe in the world, that I love the world; I believe that its grapes are worth while,—and by grapes I mean the things that people strive for and that the strong attain. The higher they hang and the harder the climb, the more I like them.”

Gavan received these interpretations without comment. “A seat in the House isn’t very high, though, is it?” he remarked.

“That depends on the sitter. It might be a splendid or a trivial thing.”

“And in my case, if I’d got it, what would it have been? Can you see that, too, you very clear-sighted young woman?”

He stood above her, smiling, but now without suavity or artificiality; looking at her as though she were a pretty gipsy whose palm he had crossed with silver. And Eppie answered, quite like a good-natured gipsy, conscious of an admiring but skeptical questioner, “I think it would have been neither.”

“But what then? What would this sitter have made of it?”

“A distraction? An experiment upon himself? I’m sure I don’t know. Indeed, I don’t pretend to know you at all yet. Perhaps I will in time.”

Once more he was conscious of the discomfort, slight and stealing, as though the gipsy knew too much already. But he protested, and with sincerity: “If there is anything to find you will certainly find it. I hope that you will find it worth your while. I hope that we shall be great friends.”

She smiled up at him, clearly and quietly: “I have always been your great friend.”

“Always? All this while?”

“All this while. Never mind if you haven’t felt it; I have. I will do for both.”

Her smile, her look, made him finally and completely understand the application of the well-worn word to her. She was charming. She could be lavish, pour out unasked bounty upon one, and yet, in no way undervaluing it, be full of delicacy, of humor, in her generosity.

“I thought I hadn’t any right to feel it,” said Gavan. “I thought you would not have remembered.”

“Well, you will find out—I always remember, it’s my strong point,” said Eppie.

IV

NEXT morning at breakfast he had quite a new impression of her.

Pale sunlight flooded the square, white room where, in all its dignified complexity of appurtenance, the simple meal was laid out. From the windows one saw the clear sky, the moor, its summer purple turned to rich browns and golds, and, nearer, the griffins with their shields.

Eppie was a little late in coming, and Gavan, while he and the general finished their wandering consumption of porridge and sat down to bacon and eggs, had time to observe by daylight in Miss Barbara, behind her high silver urn, the changes that in her were even more emphatic than in her brother. She was sweeter than ever, more appealing, more affirmative, with all manner of futile, fluttering little gestures and gentle, half-inarticulate little ejaculations of pleasure, approbation, or distress. Her smile, rather silly, worked too continually, as though moved by slackened wires. Her hands defined, described, ejaculated; over-expression had become automatic with her.

Eppie, when she appeared, said that she had had a walk, stooping to kiss her aunt and giving Gavan a firm, chill hand on her way to the same office for the general. She took her seat opposite Gavan, whistling an Irish-terrier to her from the door and, before she began to eat, dropping large fragments of bannock into his mouth. Her loose, frieze clothes smelled of peat and sunshine; her hair seemed to have the sparkle of the dew on it; she suggested mountain tarns, skylarks, morning gladness: but, with all this, Gavan, for the first time, now that she faced the hard, high light, saw how deeply, too, she suggested sadness.

Her face had moments of looking older than his own. It was fresh, it was young, but it had lived a great deal, and felt things to the bone, as it were.

There were little wrinkles about her eyes; her white brow, under its sweep of hair, was faintly lined; the oval of her cheek, long and fine, took, at certain angles, an almost haggard sharpness. It was not a faded face, nor a face to wither with years: every line of it spoke of a permanent beauty; but, with all the color that the chill morning air had brought into it, it yet made one think of bleak uplands, of weather-beaten cliffs. Life had engraved it with ineffaceable symbols. Storms had left their mark, bitter conflicts and bitter endurances.

While she ate, with great appetite, she talked incessantly, to the general, to Miss Barbara, to Gavan, but not so much to him, tossing, in the intervals of her knife and fork and cup, bits of food to the attentive terrier. He saw why the old people adored her. She was the light, the movement of their monotonous days. Not only did she bring them her life: it was their own that she vivified with her interest. The interest was not assumed, dutiful. There was no touch of the conscious being kind. She questioned as eagerly as she told. She knew and cared for every inch of the country, every individual in the country-side. She was full of sagacity and suggestion, full of anecdote and a nipping Scotch humor. And one felt strongly in her the quality of old race. Experience was in her blood, an inheritance of instinct, and, that so significant symptom, the power of playfulness—the intellectual detachment that, toward firm convictions, could afford a lightness scandalous to more crudely compacted natures, could afford gaieties and audacities, like the flights of a bird tethered by an invisible thread to a strong hand.

Miss Barbara, plaintively repining over village delinquencies, was lured to see comedy lurking in the cases of insubordination and thriftlessness, though at the mention of Archie MacHendrie, the local drunkard and wife-beater, Eppie’s brow grew black—with a blackness beside which Miss Barbara’s gloom was pallid. Eppie said that she wished some one would give Archie a thrashing, and Gavan could almost see her doing it herself.

From local topics she followed the general to politics, while he glanced down the columns of the “Scotsman,” so absorbed and so vehement that, meeting at last Gavan’s meditative eye, she seemed to become aware of an irony he had not at all intended, and said, “A crackling of thorns under a pot, all this, Gavan thinks, and, what does it all matter? You have become a philosopher, Gavan; I can see that.”

“Well, my dear, from Plato down philosophers have thought that politics did matter,” said the general, incredulous of indifference to such a topic.

“Unless they were of a school that thought that nothing did,” said Eppie.

“Gavan’s not of that weak-kneed persuasion.”

“Oh, he isn’t weak-kneed!” laughed Eppie.

She drove her aunt all morning in the little pony-cart and wrote letters after lunch, Gavan being left to the general’s care. It was not until later that she assumed toward him the more personal offices of deputy hostess, meeting him in the hall as she emerged from the morning-room, her thick sheaf of letters in her hand, and proposing a walk before tea. She took him up the well-remembered path beside the burn; but now, in the clear autumnal afternoon, he seemed further from her than last night before the fire. Already he had seen that the sense of nearness or distance depended on her will rather than his own; so that it was now she who chose to talk of trivial things, not referring by word or look to the old memories, deepest of all, that crowded about him on the hilltop, not even when, breasting the wind, they passed the solitary group of pine-trees, where she had so deeply shared his suffering, so wonderfully comprehended his fears.

She strode against the twisted flappings of her skirt, tawny strands of hair whipping across her throat, her hands deeply thrust into her pockets, her head unbowed before the enormous buffets of the wind, and he felt anew the hardy energy that would make tender, lingering touches upon the notes of the past rare things with her.

In the uproar of air, any sequence of talk was difficult. Her clear voice seemed to shout to him, like the cold shocks of a mountain stream leaping from ledge to ledge, and the trivial things she said were like the tossing of spray upon that current of deep, joyful energy.

“Isn’t it splendid!” she exclaimed at last. They had walked two miles along the crest of the hill, and, smiling in looking round at him, her face, all the sky behind it, all the wind around it, made the word match his own appreciation.

“Splendid,” he assented, thinking of her glance and poise.

Still bending her smile upon him, she said, “You already look different.”

“Different from what?” he asked, amused by her expression, as of a kindly, diagnosing young doctor.

“From last night. From what I felt of you. One might have thought that you had lost the capacity for feeling splendor.”

“Why should you have imagined me so deadened?” He kept his cheerful curiosity.

“I don’t know. I did. There,”—she paused to point,—“do you remember the wind-mill, Gavan? The old miller is dead and his son is the miller now; but the mill looks just as it did when we were little. It makes one think of birds and ships, doesn’t it?—with the beauty that it stays and doesn’t pass. When I was a child—did I ever confide it to you?—my dream was to catch one of the sails as it came down and let it carry me up, up, and right around. What fun it would have been! I suppose that one could have held on.”

“In pretty grim earnest, after the first fun.”

“It would be the sense of coming grimness that would make the desperate thrill of it.”

“You are fond of thrills and perils.”

“Not fond, exactly; the love of risk is a deeper thing—something fundamental in us, I suppose.”

She had walked on, down the hillside, where gorse bushes pulled at her skirts, and he was putting together last night’s impressions with to-day’s, and thinking that if she embodied the instinctive, the life-loving, it wasn’t in the simple, unreflecting forms that the words usually implied. She was simple, but not in the least guileless, and her directness was a choice among recognized complexities. It was no spontaneous child of nature who, on the quieter hillside, where they could talk, talked of India, now, of his life there, the people he had known, many of whom she too knew. He knew that he was being managed, being made to talk of what she wanted to hear, that she was still engaged in penetrating. He was quite willing to be managed, penetrated,—for as far as she could get; he could rely on his own deftness in retreat before too deep a probe, though, should she discover that for him the lessons of life had resulted in an outlook perhaps the antipodes from her own, he guessed that her own would show no wavering. Still, she should run, if possible, no such risk. They were to be friends, good friends: that was, as she had said, not only an accomplished, but a long-accomplished fact; but, even more than in childhood, she would be a friend held at arm’s-length.

Meanwhile, unconscious, no doubt, of these barriers, Eppie walked beside him and made him talk about himself. She knew, of course, of his mother’s death; she did not speak of that: many barriers were her own—she was capable of most delicate avoidances. But she asked after his father. “He is still alive, I hear.”

“Yes, indeed, and gives me a good deal of his company.”

“Oh.” She was a little at a loss. He could guess at what she had heard of his father. He went on, though choosing his words in a way that showed a slight wincing behind his wish to be very frank and friendly with her, for even yet his father made him wince, standing, as he did, for the tragedy of his mother’s life: “He is very much alive for a person so gone to pieces. But I can put up with him far more comfortably than when he was less pitiable.”

“How much do you have to put up with him?” she asked, trying to image, as he saw, his mÉnage in Surrey, in the house he had just been describing to her, its old bricks all vague pinks and mauves, its high-walled gardens clustering near it, its wonderful hedges, that, he said, it ruined him to keep up to their reputation of exquisite formality; and, within, its vast library—all the house a brain, practically, the other rooms like mere places for life’s renewal before centering in the intellectual workshop. She evidently found it difficult to place, among the hedges, the lawns, the long walls of the library, a father, gone to pieces perhaps, but displaying all the more helplessly his general unworthiness. Even in lenient circles, Captain Palairet was thought to have an undignified record.

“Oh, he is there for most of the time. He is there now,” said Gavan, without pathos. “He has no money left, and now that I’ve a little I’m the obvious thing to retire to.”

“I hope that it’s not very horrid for you.”

“I can’t say that it’s horrid at all. I don’t see much of him, and, in many respects, he has remained, for the onlooker, rather a charming creature. He gives me very little trouble—smokes, eats, plays billiards. When we meet, we are very affable.”

Eppie did not say, “You tolerate him because he is piteous,” but he imagined that she guessed it.

V

HE was awakened early next morning by the sound of singing in the garden below.

His windows were widely opened and a cold, pure air filled the room. He lay dreamily listening for some moments before recognizing Eppie’s voice—recognizing it, though he had never heard her sing.

Fresh and strong, it put a new vitality into the simple sadness of an old Scotch ballad, as though in the very sorrow it found joy. It was not an emotional voice. Clearly and firmly it sounded, and seemed a part of the frosty, sunny morning, part of the sky that was like a great chalice filled with light, of the whitened hills, the aromatic pine-woods, and the distant, rushing burn. He had sprung up after the first dreamy listening and looked out at it all, and at her walking through the garden, her dog at her heels. She went out by the little gate sunken deep in the wall, and disappeared in the woods; and still the voice reached him, singing on, and at each repetition of the monotonous, departing melody, a sadder, sweeter sense of pain strove in his heart.

He listened, looking down at the pine-tree beneath the window, at the garden, the summer-house, the withered tangle of the rose upon the wall, and up at the hilltop, at the crystalline sky; and such a sudden pang of recollection pierced him that tears came to his eyes.

What was it that he remembered? or, rather, what did he not? Things deep and things trivial, idle smiles, wrenching despairs, youth, sorrow, laughter,—all the past was in the pang, all the future, too, it seemed, and he could not have said whether his mother, Alice, Eppie with her dolls, and little Robbie, or the clairvoyant intuition of a future waiting for him here—whether presage or remembrance—were its greater part.

Not until the voice had died, in faintest filaments of sound, far away among the woods, did the pain fade, leaving him shaken. Such moods were like dead things starting to life, and reminded him too vividly of the fact that as long as one was alive, one was, indeed, in danger from life; and though his thought was soon able to disentangle itself from the knot of awakened emotions that had entwined it for a moment, a vague sense of fear remained with him. Something had been demanded of him—something that he had, involuntarily, found himself giving. This it was to have still a young nature, sensitive to impressions. He understood. Yet it was with a slight, a foolishly boyish reluctance, as he told himself, that he went down some hours later to meet Eppie at breakfast.

There was an unlooked-for refuge for him when he found her hardly noticing him, and very angry over some village misdemeanor. The anger held her far away. She dilated on the subject all during breakfast, pouring forth her wrath, without excitement, but with a steady vehemence. It was an affair of a public-house, and Eppie accused the publican of enticing his clients to drink, of corrupting the village sobriety, and she urged the general, as local magistrate, to take immediate action, showing a very minute knowledge of the technicalities of the case.

“My dear,” the general expostulated, “indeed I don’t think that the man has done anything illegal; we are powerless about the license in such a case. You must get more evidence.”

“I have any amount of evidence. The man is a public nuisance. Poor Mrs. MacHendrie was crying to me about it this morning. Archie is hardly ever sober now. I shall drive over to Carlowrie and see Sir Alec about it; as the wretch’s landlord he can make it uncomfortable for him, and I’ll see that he makes it as uncomfortable as possible.”

Laughingly, but slightly harassed, the general said: “You see, we have a tyrant here. Eppie is really a bit too hard on the man. He is an unpleasant fellow, I own, a most unpleasant manner—a beast, if you will, but a legal beast.”

“The most unpleasant form of animal, isn’t it? It’s very good of Eppie to care so much,” said Gavan.

“You don’t care, I suppose,” she said, turning her eyes on him, as though she saw him for the first time that morning.

“I should feel more hopeless about it, perhaps.”

“Why, pray?”

“At all events, I shouldn’t be able to feel so much righteous indignation.”

“Why not?”

“He is pretty much of a product, isn’t he?—not worse, I suppose, than the men whose weakness enriches him. It’s a pity, of course, that one can’t painlessly pinch such people out of existence, as one would offensive insects.”

Eppie, across the table, eyed him, her anger quieted. “He is a product of a good many things,” she said, now in her most reasonable manner, “and he is going to be a product of some more before I’m done with him,—a product of my hatred for him and his kind, for one thing. That will be a new factor in his development. Gavan,” she smiled, “you and I are going to quarrel.”

“Dear Eppie!” Miss Barbara interposed. “Gavan, you must not take her seriously; she so often says extravagant things just to tease one.” Really dismayed, alternately nodding and shaking her head in reassurance and protest, she looked from one to the other. “And don’t, dear, say such unchristian things of anybody. She is not so hard and unforgiving as she sounds, Gavan.”

“Aunt Barbara! Aunt Barbara!” laughed Eppie, leaning her elbows on the table, her eyes still on Gavan, “my hatred for Macdougall isn’t nearly as unchristian as Gavan’s indifference. I don’t want to pinch him painlessly out of life at all. I think that life has room for us both. I want to have him whipped, or made uncomfortable in some way, until he becomes less horrid.”

“Whipped, dear! People are never whipped nowadays! It was a very barbarous punishment indeed, and, thank God, we have outgrown it. We will outgrow it all some day. And as to any punishment, I don’t know, I really don’t. Resist not evil,” Miss Barbara finished in a vague, helpless murmur, uncertain as to what course would at once best apply to Macdougall’s case and satisfy the needs of public sobriety.

“Perhaps one owes it to people to resist them,” Eppie answered.

“Oh, Eppie dear, if only you cared a little more for Maeterlinck!” sighed Miss Barbara, the more complex readings of whose later years had been somewhat incongruously adapted to her early simple faiths. “Do you remember that beautiful thing he says,—and Gavan’s attitude reminds me of it,—‘Le sage qui passe interrompt mille drÂmes’?”

“You will be quoting Tolstoi to me next, Aunt Barbara. I suspect that such sages would interrupt a good deal more than dramas.”

“I hope that you care for Tolstoi, Gavan,” said Miss Barbara, not forgetful of his boyish pieties. “Not the novels,—they are very, very sad, and so long, and the characters have such a number of names it is most confusing,—but the dear little books on religion. It is all there: love of all men, and non-resistance of evil, and self-renunciation.”

“Yes,” Gavan assented, while Eppie looked rather gravely at him.

“How beautiful this world would be if we could see it so—no hatred, no strife, no evil.”

Again Gavan assented with, “None.”

“None; and no life either,” Eppie finished for them.

She rose, thrusting her hands into alternate pockets looking for a note-book, which she found and consulted. “I’m off for the fray, Uncle Nigel, for hatred and strife. You and Gavan are going to shoot, so I’ll bring you your lunch at the corner of the Carlowrie woods.”

“So that you and Gavan may continue your quarrel there. Very well. I prefer listening.”

“Gavan understands that Eppie must not be taken seriously,” Miss Barbara interposed; but Eppie rejoined, drawing on her gloves, “Indeed, I intend to be taken seriously. I quarrel with people I like as well as with those I hate.”

“You are going to be a factor in my development, too?” said Gavan.

“Of course, as you are in mine, as we all are in one another’s. We can’t help that. And my attack on you shall be conscious.”

These open threats didn’t at all alarm him. It was what was unconscious in her that stirred disquiet.

When Eppie had departed and the general had gone off to see to preparations for the morning’s shoot, Miss Barbara, still sitting rather wistfully behind her urn, said: “I hope, dear Gavan, that you will be able to influence Eppie a little. I am so thankful to find you unchanged about all the deeper things of life. You could help her, I am sure. She needs guidance. She is so loving, so clever, a joy to Nigel and to me; but she is very headstrong, very reckless and wilful,—a will in subjection to nothing but her own sense of right. It’s not that she is altogether irreligious,—thank Heaven for that,—but she hasn’t any of the happiness of religion. There is no happiness, is there, Gavan—I feel sure that you see it as I do,—but in having our lives stayed on the Eternal?”

Gavan, as it was very easy to do, assented again.

He spent the morning with the general in shooting over the rather scant covers, and at two, in a sheltered bend of the woods, where the sunlight lay still and bright, Eppie joined them, bringing the lunch-basket in her dog-cart.

She was in a very good humor, and while, sitting above them, she dispensed rations, announced to her uncle the result of her visit to Sir Alec.

“He thinks he can turn him out if any flagrant ease of drunkenness occurs again. We talked over the conditions of his lease.”

“Carston, I am sure, doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about it.”

“Of course not; but he cares that I care.”

“You see, Gavan, by what strings the world is pulled. Carston hasn’t two ideas in his head.”

“Luckily I am here to use his empty head to advantage. I wheedled Lady Carston, too,—the bad influence Macdougall had on church-going. Lady Carston’s one idea, Gavan, is the keeping of the Sabbath. Altogether it was an excellent morning’s work.” Eppie was cheerful and triumphant. She was eating from a plate on her knees and drinking milk out of a little silver cup. “Do you think me a tiresome, managing busybody, Gavan?” She smiled down at him, and her lashes catching the sunlight, an odd, misty glitter half veiled her eyes. “You look,” she added, “as you used to look when you were a little boy. The years collapsed just then.”

He was conscious that, under her sudden glance, he had, indeed, looked shy. It was not her light question, but the strange depth of her half-closed eyes.

“I find a great deal of the old Eppie in you: I remember that you used to want to bully the village people for their good.”

“I’m still a bully, I think, but a more discreet one. Won’t you have some milk, Gavan? You used to love milk when you were a little boy. Have you outgrown that?”

“Not at all. I should still love some; but don’t rob yourself.”

“There ‘s heaps here. I’ve no spare glass. Do you mind?” She held out to him the silver cup, turning its untouched edge to him, something maternal in the gesture, in the down-looking of her sun-dazed eyes.

He felt himself foolishly flushing while he drank the milk; and when, really seized by a silly childish shyness, he protested that he wanted no more, she placidly, with an emphasizing of her air of sweet, comprehending authority, said, “Oh, but you must; it holds almost nothing.”

For the second time that day, as he obediently took from her hand the innocent little cup, Gavan had the unreasoning impulse of tears.

The sunny afternoon was silent. Overhead, the sky had its chalice look, clear, benignant, brimmed with light. The general, the lolling dogs, were part of the background, with the heather and the wood of larches, the finely falling sprays delicately blurred upon the sky.

It was again something sweet, sweet, simple and profound, that brought again that pang of presage and of pain. But the pain was like a joy, and the tears like tears of happiness in the sunny stillness, where her firm and gentle hand gave him milk in a silver cup.

The actual physical sensation of a rising saltness was an alarm signal that, with a swift reversal of mental wheels, brought a revulsion of consciousness. He saw himself threatened once more by nature’s enchantments: wily nature, luring one always back to life with looks from comrade eyes, touches from comrade fingers, pastoral drinks all seeming innocence, and embracing sunlight. Wily Circe. With a long breath, the mirage was seen as mirage and the moment’s dangerous blossoming withered as if dust had been strewn over it.

VI

TO see his own susceptibility so plainly was, he told himself, to be safe from it; not safe from its pang, perhaps, but safe from its power, and that was the essential thing.

It was not to Eppie, as he further assured himself, that he was susceptible. Eppie stood for life, personified its appeals; he could feel, yet be unmoved, by all life’s blandishments.

Meanwhile on a very different plane—the after all remote plane of mental encounters and skirmishes—he felt, with relief, that he was entirely master of his own meaning. There were many of these skirmishes, and though he did not believe any of them planned, believe that she was carrying out her threat of conscious attack, he was aware that she was alert and inquisitive, and dexterously quick at taking any occasion that offered for further penetration.

The first of these occasions was on Sunday evening when, after tea and in the gloaming, they sat together in the deep window-seat of one of the library windows and listened to Miss Barbara softly touching the chords of a hymn on the plaintive old piano and softly singing—a most unobtrusive accompaniment, at her distance and with her softness, for any talk or any thoughts of theirs. They had talked very little, watching the sunset burn itself out over the frosty moorland, and Gavan presently, while he listened, closed his eyes and leaned his head back upon the oak recess. Eppie, looking now from the sunset to him, observed him with an open, musing curiosity. His head, leaning back in the dusk, was like the ivory carving of a dead saint—a saint young, beautiful, at peace after long sorrow. Peace; that was the quality that his whole being expressed, though, with opened eyes, his face had the more human look of patience, verging now and then on a quiet dejection that would overspread his features like a veil. In boyhood, the peace, the placid dejection, had not been there; his face then had shown the tension of struggle and endurance.

Miss Barbara quavered, and Gavan, opening his eyes at the closing cadence, found Eppie’s bent upon him. He smiled, and looked still more, she thought, the sad saint, all benediction and indifference, and an impulse of antagonism to such sainthood made her say, though smiling back, “How I dislike those words.”

“Do you?” said Gavan.

“Hate them? Why, dear child?” asked Miss Barbara, who had heard through the sigh of her held-down pedal.

“I don’t want to lose myself,” said Eppie. “But I didn’t mean that I wanted you to stop, Aunt Barbara. Do go on. I love to hear you sing, however much I disapprove of the words.”

But Miss Barbara, clasping and unclasping her hands a little nervously, and evidently finding the moment too propitious to be passed over, backed as she was by an ally, rose and came to them.

“That is the very point you are so mistaken about, dear. It’s the self, you know, that keeps us from love.”

“It’s the self that makes love possible,” said Eppie, taking her hand and looking up at her. “Do you want to lose me, Aunt Barbara? If you lose yourself you will have to lose me too, you know.”

Miss Barbara stood perplexed but not at all convinced by these subtleties, turning mild eyes of query upon Gavan and evidently expecting him to furnish the obvious retort.

“We will all be at one with God,” she reverently said at length, finding that her ally left the defense to her.

Eppie met this large retort cheerfully. “You can’t love God unless you have a self to love him with. I know what you mean, and perhaps I agree with what you really mean; but I want to correct your Buddhistic tendencies and to keep you a good Christian.”

“I humbly hope I’m that. You shouldn’t jest on such subjects, Eppie dear.”

“I’m not one bit jesting,” Eppie protested. And now Gavan asked, while Miss Barbara looked gratefully at him, sure of his backing, though she might not quite be able to understand his methods, “Are they such different creeds?”

Still holding her aunt’s hand and still looking up into her face, Eppie answered: “One is despair of life, the other trust in life. One takes all meaning out of life and the other fills it with meaning. The secret of one is to lose life, and the secret of the other to gain it. There is all the difference in the world between them; all the difference between life and death.”

“As interpreted by Western youth and vigor, yes; but what of the mystics? I suppose you would call them Christians?”

“Yes, dear, they are Christians. What of them?” Miss Barbara echoed, though slightly perturbed by this alliance with heathendom.

“Buddhists, not Christians,” Eppie retorted.

“That’s what I mean; in essentials they are the same creed: the differences are only the differences of the races or individuals who hold them.”

At this Miss Barbara’s free hand began to flutter and protest. “Oh, but, Gavan dear, there I’m quite sure that you are wrong. Buddhism is, I don’t doubt, a very noble religion, but it’s not the true one. Indeed they are not the same, Gavan, though Christianity, of course, is founded on the renunciation of self. ‘Lose your life to gain it,’ Eppie dear.”

“Yes, to gain it, that’s just the point. One renounces, and one wins a realer self.”

“What is real? What is life?” Gavan asked, really curious to hear her definition.

She only needed a moment to find it, and, with her answer, gave him her first glance during their battledore colloquy with innocent Aunt Barbara as the shuttlecock. “Selves and love.”

“Well, of course, dear,” Miss Barbara cried. “That’s what heaven will be. All love and peace and rest.”

“But you have left out the selves; you won’t get love without them. And as for rest and peace—Love is made by difference, so that as long as there is love there must be restlessness.”

“Isn’t it made by sameness?” Gavan asked.

“No, by incompleteness: one loves what could complete oneself and what one could complete; or so it seems to me.”

“And as long as there are selves, will there be suffering, too?”

Her eyes met his thought fearlessly.

“That question, I am sure, is the basis for all the religions of cowardice, religions that deny life because of their craving for peace.”

“Isn’t the craving for peace as legitimate as the craving for life?”

“Nothing that denies life can be legitimate. Life is the one arbitrator. And restlessness need not mean suffering. A symphony is all restlessness—a restlessness made by difference in harmony; forgive the well-worn metaphor, but it is a good one. And, suppose that it did mean suffering, all of it. Isn’t it worth it?” Her eyes measured him, not in challenge, but quietly.

“What a lover of life you are,” he said. It was like seeing him go into his house and, not hastily, but very firmly, shut the door. And as if, rather rudely, she hurled a stone at the shut door, she asked, “Do you love anything?”

He smiled. “Please don’t quarrel with me.”

“I wish I could make you quarrel. I suspect you of loving everything,” Eppie declared.

She didn’t pursue him further on this occasion, when, indeed, he might accuse himself of having given her every chance; but on the next day, as they sat out at the edge of the birch-wood in a wonderfully warm afternoon sun, he, she, and Peter the dog (what a strange, changed echo it was), she returned, very lightly, to their discussion, tossing merely a few reconnoitering flowers in at his open window.

She had never, since their remeeting, seemed to him so young. Holding a little branch of birch, she broke off and aimed bits of its bark at a tall gorse-bush near them. Peter basked, full length, in the sunlight at their feet. The day had almost the indolent quiet of summer.

Eppie said, irrelevantly, for they had not been talking of that, but of people again, gossiping pleasantly, with gossip tempered to the day’s mildness: “I can’t bear the religions of peace, you see—any faith that takes the fight out of people. That Molly Carruthers I was telling you about has become a Christian Scientist, and she is in an imbecile condition of beatitude all the time. ‘Isn’t the happiness that comes of such a faith proof enough?’ she says to me. As if happiness were a proof! A drunkard is happy. Some people seem to me spiritually tipsy, and as unfit for usefulness as the drunkard. I think I distrust anything that gives a final satisfaction.”

She amused him in her playing with half-apprehended thoughts. Her assurance was as light as though they were the bits of birch-bark she tossed.

“You make me think a little of Nietzsche,” he said.

“I should rather like Nietzsche right side up, I think. As he is standing on his head most of the time, it’s rather confusing. If it is a blind, unconscious force that has got hold of us, we get hold of it, and of ourselves, when we consciously use it for our own ends. But I’m not a bit a Nietzschian, Gavan, for, as an end, an Overman doesn’t at all appeal to me and I don’t intend to make myself a bridge for him to march across. Of course Nietzsche might reply, ‘You are the bridge, whether you want to be or not.’ He might say, ‘It’s better to walk willingly to your inevitable holocaust than to be rebelliously haled along; whatever you do, you are only the refuse whose burning makes the flame.’ I reply to that, that if the Overman is sure to come, why should I bother about him? I wouldn’t lift my finger for a distant perfection in which I myself, and all those I loved, only counted as fuel. But, on the other hand, I do believe that each one of us is going to grow into an Overman—in a quite different sense. Peter, too, will be an Overdog, and will, no doubt, sometime be more conscious than we are now.”

Gavan glanced at her and at Peter with his vague, half-unseeing glance.

“Why don’t you smile?” Eppie asked. “Not that you don’t smile, often. But you haven’t a scrap of gaiety, Gavan. Do stop soaring in the sky and come down to real things, to the earth, to me, to dear little rudimentary Overdogs.”

“Do you think that dear little rudimentary dogs are nearer reality than the sky?” He did smile now.

“Much nearer. The sky is only a background, an emptiness that shows up their meaning.”

She had brought him down, for his eyes lingered on her as she leaned to Peter and pulled him up from his sun-baked recumbency. “Come, sit up, Peter; don’t be so comfortable. Watch how well I’ve trained him, Gavan. Now, Peter, sit up nicely. A dog on all fours is a darling heathen; but a dog sitting up on his hind legs is an ethical creature, and well on his way to Overdogdom. Peter on his hind legs is worth all your tiresome Hindoos—aren’t you, dear, Occidental dog?”

He knew that through her gaiety she was searching him, feeling her way, with a merry hostility that she didn’t intend him to answer. It was as if she wouldn’t take seriously, not for a moment, the implications of his thought—implications that he suspected her of already pretty sharply guessing at. To herself, and to him, she pretended that such thoughts were a game he played at, until she should see just how seriously she might be forced to take them.

VII

FOR the next few days he found himself involved in Eppie’s sleuth-hound pursuit of the transgressing publican, amused, but quite willing,—somewhat, he saw, to her surprise,—to help her in her crusade. Not only did he tramp over the country with her in search of evidence, and expound the Gothenberg system to Sir Alec, to the general, to the rather alarmed quarry himself,—not unwilling to come to terms,—but the application of his extraordinarily practical good-sense to the situation was, she couldn’t help seeing, far more effective than her own not altogether temperate zeal.

She was surprised and she was pleased; and at the same time, throughout all the little drama, she had the suspicion that it meant for him what that playing of dolls with her in childhood had meant—mere kindliness, and a selfless disposition to do what was agreeable to anybody.

It was on the Saturday following the talk in the library that an incident occurred that made her vision of his passivity flame into something more ambiguous—an incident that gave margins for possibilities in him, for whose bare potentiality she had begun to fear.

They were at evening in the gray, bleak village street, and outside one of the public-houses found a small crowd collected, watching, with the apathy of custom, the efforts of Archie MacHendrie’s wife to lead him home. Archie, a large, lurching man, was only slightly drunk, but his head, the massive granite of its Scotch peasant type, had been brutalized by years of hard drinking. It showed, as if the granite were crumbling into earth, sodden depressions and protuberances; his eye was lurid, heavy, yet alert. Mrs. MacHendrie’s face, looking as though scantily molded in tallow as the full glare of the bar-room lights beat upon it, was piteously patient. The group, under the cold evening sky, in the cold, steep street, seemed a little epitome of life’s degradation; the sordid glare of debasing pleasure lit it; the mean monotony of its daily routine surrounded it in the gaunt stone cottages; above it was the blank, hard sky.

Gavan saw all the unpleasing picture, placed it, its past, its future, as he and Eppie approached; saw more, too, than degradation: for the wife’s face, in its patience, symbolized humanity’s heroism. Both heroism and degradation were results as necessary as the changes in a chemical demonstration; neither had value: one was a toadstool growth, the other, a flower; this was the fact to him, though the flower touched him and the toadstool made him shrink.

“There, there, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie was pleading, “come awa hame, do.”

Archie was declaiming on some wrong he had suffered and threatened to do for an enemy.

That these flowers and toadstools were of vital significance to Eppie, Gavan realized as she left him in the middle of the street and strode to the center of the group. It fell aside for her air of facile, friendly authority, and in answer to her decisive, “What’s the matter?” one of the apathetic onlookers explained in his deliberate Scotch: “It’s nobbut Archie, Miss Eppie; he’s swearin’ he’ll na go hame na sleep gin he’s lickit Tam Donel’. He’s a wee bit the waur for the drink and Tam’ll soon be alang, and the dei’ll be in it gar his gudewife gets him ben.”

“Well, she must get him ben,” said Eppie, her eye measuring Archie, who shook a menacing fist in the direction of his expected antagonist.

“We must get him home between us, Mrs. MacHendrie. He’ll think better of it in the morning.”

“Fech, an’ it’s that I’m aye tellin’ him, Miss Eppie; it’s the mornin’ he’ll hae the sair head. Ay, Miss Eppie, he’s an awfu’ chiel when he’s a wee bittie fou.” Mrs. MacHendrie put the fringe of her shawl to her eyes.

Archie’s low thunder had continued during this dialogue without a pause, and Eppie now addressed herself to him in authoritative tones. “Come on, Archie. Go home and get a sleep, at all events, before you fight Tom.”

“It’s that I’m aye tellin’ you, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie wept.

Archie now brought his eye round to the speakers and observed them in an ominous silence, his thoughts turned from more distant grievances. From his wife his eye traveled back to Eppie, who met it with a firm severity.

“Damn ye for an interferin’ fishwife!” suddenly and with startling force he burst out. “Ye’re no but a meddlesome besom. Awa wi’ ye!” and from this broadside he swung round to his wife with uplifted fists. Flinging herself between them, Eppie found herself swept aside. Gavan was in the midst of the sudden uproar. Like a David before Goliath, he confronted Archie with a quelling eye. Mrs. MacHendrie had slipped into the dusk, and the bald, ugly light now fell on Gavan’s contrasting head.

“Un sage qui passe interrompt mille drÂmes,” flashed in Eppie’s mind. But on this occasion, the sage had to do more than pass—was forced, indeed, to provide the drama. He was speaking in a voice so dispassionately firm that had Archie been a little less drunk or a little less sober it must have exerted an almost hypnotic effect upon him. But the command to go home reached a brain inflamed and hardly dazed. Goliath fell upon David, and Eppie, with a curious mingling of exultation and panic, saw the two men locked in an animal struggle. For a moment Gavan’s cool alertness and scientific resource were overborne by sheer brute force; in another he had recovered himself, and Archie’s face streamed suddenly with blood. Another blow, couched like a lance, it seemed, was in readiness, wary and direct, when Mrs. MacHendrie, from behind, seized Gavan around the neck and, with a shrill scream, hung to him and dragged him back. Helpless and enmeshed, he received a savage blow from her husband, and, still held in the wife’s strangling clutch, he and she reeled back together. At this flagrant violation of fair play the onlookers interposed. Archie was dragged off, and Eppie, catching Gavan as he staggered free of his encumbrance, turned, while she held him by the shoulders, fiercely on Mrs. MacHendrie. “You well deserve every thrashing you get,” she said, her voice stilled by the very force of its intense anger.

Mrs. MacHendrie had covered her face with her shawl. “My mon was a’ bluid,” she sobbed. “I couldna stan’ an’ see him done to death.”

“Of course you couldn’t; it was most natural of you,” said Gavan. The blood trickled over his brow and cheek as, gently freeing himself from Eppie, he straightened his collar and looked at Mrs. MacHendrie with sympathetic curiosity.

“Natural!” said Eppie. “It was dastardly. You deserve every thrashing you get. I hope no one will interfere for you next time.”

“My dear Eppie!” Gavan murmured, while Mrs. MacHendrie continued to weep humbly.

“Why shouldn’t I say it? I am disgusted with her.” Eppie turned almost as fierce a stillness of look and tone upon him as upon Mrs. MacHendrie. “Let me tie up your head, Gavan. Yes, indeed, you are covered with blood. I suppose you never thought, Mrs. MacHendrie, that your husband might kill Mr. Palairet.” She passed her handkerchief around Gavan’s forehead as she spoke, knotting it with fingers at once tender and vindictive.

“I canna say, Miss Eppie,” came Mrs. MacHendrie’s muffled voice from the shawl. “The wan’s my ain mon. It juist cam’ ower me, seein’ him a’ bluid.”

“Well, you have the satisfaction now of seeing Mr. Palairet a’ bluid.” Eppie tied her knots, and Gavan, submitting a bowed head to her ministrations, still kept his look of cogitating pity upon Mrs. MacHendrie. “You see how your husband has wounded him,” Eppie went on; “the handkerchief is red already. Come on, Gavan; lean on me, please. Let her get her husband home now as best she can.”

But Gavan ignored his angry champion. Mrs. MacHendrie’s sorrow, most evidently, interested him more than Eppie’s indignation. He went to her, putting down the hand that held the shawl to the poor, disfigured, tallow face, and made her look at him, while he said with a gentle reasonableness: “Don’t mind what Miss Gifford says; she is angry on my account and doesn’t really mean to be so hard on you. I’m not at all badly hurt,—I can perfectly stand alone, Eppie,—and I’m sorry I had to hurt your husband. It was perfectly natural, what you did. Don’t cry; please don’t cry.” He smiled at her, comforted her, encouraged her. “They are taking your husband home, you see; he is going quite quietly. And now we will take you home. Take my arm. You are the worst off of us all, Mrs. MacHendrie.”

Eppie, in silence, stalked beside him while he led Mrs. MacHendrie, dazed and submissive, up the village street. A neighbor’s wife was in kindly waiting and Archie already slumbering heavily on his bed. Eppie suspected, as they went, that she saw a gold piece slipped from Gavan’s hand to Mrs. MacHendrie’s.

“Poor thing,” he said, when they were once more climbing the steep street, “I ‘m afraid I only made things worse for her”; and laughing a little, irrepressibly, he looked round at Eppie from under his oddly becoming bandage. “My dear Eppie, what a perfect brute you were to her!”

“My dear Gavan, I can’t feel pity for such a fool. Oh, yes I can, but I don’t want to. Please remember that I, too, have impulses, and that I saw you ‘a’ bluid.’”

“Well, then, I’m the brute for scolding you, and you are another poor thing.”

“Are you incapable of righteous indignation, Gavan?”

“Surely I showed enough to please you in my treatment of Archie.”

“You showed none. You looked supremely indifferent as to whether he killed you or you him.”

“Oh, I think I was quite anxious to do for him.”

They were past the village now and upon the country road, and in the darkness their contrasting voices rang oddly—hers deep with its resentful affection, his light with its amusement. It was as if the little drama, that he had made instead of interrupting, struck his sense of the ridiculous. Yet, angry with him as she was, a thrill of exultation remained, for Eppie, in the thought of his calm, deliberate face, beautiful before its foe, and with blood upon it.

VIII

GAVAN’S hurt soon healed, though it made him languid for a day or two—days of semi-invalidism, the unemphatic hours, seemingly so colorless, when she read to him or merely sat silently at hand occupied with her letters or a book, drawing still closer their odd intimacy; it could hardly be called sudden, for it had merely skipped intervening years, and it couldn’t be called a proved intimacy, the intervening years were too full, too many for that. But they were very near in their almost solitude—a solitude surrounded by gentle reminders of the closer past, reminders, in the case of living personalities, who seemed to find the intimacy altogether natural and needing no comment. What the general and Miss Barbara might really be thinking was a wonder that at moments occupied both Gavan and Eppie’s ruminations; but it wasn’t a wonder that needed to go far or deep. What they thought, the dear old people, made very little difference—not even the difference of awkwardness or self-consciousness under too cogitating eyes. Even if they thought the crude and obvious thing it didn’t matter, they would so peacefully relapse from their false inference once time had set it straight for them. Eppie couldn’t quite have told herself why its obviousness was so crude; in all her former experience such obviousness had never been so almost funnily out of the question. But Gavan made so many things almost funnily out of the question.

It was this quality in him, of difference from usual things, that drew intimacy so near. To talk to him with a wonderful openness, to tell him about herself, about her troubles, was like sinking down in a pale, peaceful church and sighing out everything that lay heavily on one’s heart—the things that lay lightly, too, for little things as well as great, were understood by that compassionate, musing presence—to the downlooking face of an imaged saint.

No claim upon one remained after it; one was freed of the load of silence and one hadn’t in the least been shackled by retributory penances. And if one felt some strange lack in the saint, if his sacerdotal quality was more than his humanity, it was just because of that that one was able to say anything one liked.

At moments, it is true, she had an odd, fetish-worshiper’s impulse to smash her saint, and perhaps the reason why she never yielded to it was because, under all the seeing him as image, was the deep hoping that he was more. If he was more, much more, it might be unwise to smash him, for then she would have no pale church in which to take refuge, and, above all, if he were more he mustn’t find it out—and she mustn’t—through any act of her own. The saint himself must breathe into life and himself step down from his high pedestal. That he cared to listen, that he listened lovingly,—just as he had listened lovingly to Mrs. MacHendrie,—she knew.

One day when he was again able to be out and when they were again upon the hilltop, walking in a mist that enshrouded them, she told him all about the wretched drama of her love-affair.

She had never spoken of it to a human being.

It was as if she led him into an empty room, dusty and dark and still, with dreary cobwebs stretching over its once festal furniture, and there pointed out to him faded blood-stains on the floor. No eyes but his had ever seen them.

She told him all, analyzing the man, herself, unflinchingly, putting before him her distracted heart, distorted in its distraction. She had appalled herself. Her part had not been mere piteous nobility. She would have dragged herself through any humiliation to have had him back, the man she had helplessly adored. She would have taken him back on almost any terms. Only the semblance of pride had been left to her; beneath it, with all her scorn of him, was a craving that had been base in its despair.

“But that wasn’t the worst,” said Eppie; “that very baseness had its pathos. Worst of all were my mean regrets. I had sacrificed my ambitions for him; I had refused a man who would have given me the life I wanted, a high place in the world, a great name, power, wide issues,—and I love high places, Gavan, I love power. When I refused him, he too married some one else, and it was after that that my crash came. Love and faith were thrown back at me, and I hadn’t in it all even my dignity. I was torn by mingled despairs. I loathed myself. Oh, it was too horrible!”

His utter lack of sympathetic emotion, even when she spoke with the indignant tears on her cheeks, made it all the easier to say these fundamental things, and more than ever like the saint of ebony and ivory in the pale church was his head against the great wash of mist about them.

“And now it has all dropped from you,” he said.

“Yes, all—the love, the regret certainly, even the shame. The ambition, certainly not; but in that ugly form of a loveless marriage it’s no longer a possible temptation for me. My disappointment hasn’t driven me to worldly materialism. It’s a sane thing in nature, that outgrowing of griefs, though it’s bad for one’s pride to see them fade and one’s heart mend, solidly mend, once more.”

“They do go, when one really sees them.”

“Some do.”

“All, when one really sees them,” he repeated unemphatically. “I know all about it, Eppie. I’ve been through the fire, too. Now that it’s gone, you see that it’s only a dream, that love, don’t you?”

Eppie gazed before her into the mist, narrowing her eyes as though she concentrated her thoughts upon his exact meaning, and she received his casual confidence with some moments of silence.

“That would imply that seeing destroyed feeling, wouldn’t it?” she said at last. “I see that such love is a dream, if you will; but dreams may be mirrors of life, not delusions; hints of an awakened reality.”

He showed only his unmoved face. This talk, so impersonal, with all its revealment of human pathos and weakness, so much a picture that they both looked at it together,—a picture of outlived woe,—claimed no more than his contemplation; but when her voice seemed to grope toward him, questioning in its very clearness of declaration, he felt again the flitting fear that he had already recognized, not as danger, but as discomfort. It flitted only, hardly stirred the calm he showed her, as the wings of a flying bird just skim and ruffle the surface of still, deep waters. That restless bird, always hovering, circling near, its shadow passing, repassing over the limpid water—he saw and knew it as the water might reflect in its stillness the bird’s flight. Life; the will to live, the will to want, and to strive, and to suffer in striving. All the waters of Eppie’s soul were broken by the flight of this bird of life; its wings, cruel and beautiful, furrowed and cut; its plumage, darkly bright, was reflected in every wave.

He said nothing after her last words.

“You think all feelings delusions, Gavan?”

“Not that, perhaps, but very transitory; and to be tied to the transitory is to suffer.”

“On that plan one ends with nothingness.”

“Do you think so?”

“Do you think so?” She turned his question on him and her eyes, with the question, fixed hard on his face.

He felt suddenly that after all the parrying and thrusting she had struck up his foil and faced him with no mask of gaiety—in deadly earnest. There was the click of steel in the question.

He did not know whether he were the more irritated, for her sake, by her persistency, or the more fearful that, unwillingly, he should do her faith some injury.

“I think,” he said, “more or less as Tolstoi thinks. You understood all that very well the other evening; so why go into it?”

“You think that our human identity is unreal—an appearance?”

“Most certainly.”

“And that the separation between us is the illusion that makes hatred and evil, and that with the recognition of the illusion, love would come and all selfish effort cease?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t you see that what that results in is the Hindoo thing, the abolishing of consciousness, the abolishing of life—of individual life?”

“Yes, I see that,” Gavan smiled, “but I’m a little surprised to see that you do. So many people are like Aunt Barbara.”

But Eppie was pushing, pushing against the closed doors and would not be lured away by lightness. “Above all, Gavan, do you see that he is merely an illogical Hindoo when he tries to bridge his abyss with ethics? On his own premises he is utterly fatalistic, so that the very turning from the evil illusion, the very breaking down of the barrier of self, is never, with him, the result of an effort of the will, never a conscious choice, but something deep and rudimentary, subconscious, an influx of revelation, a vision that sets one free, perhaps, but that can only leave one with emptiness.”

Above all, as she had said, he saw it; and now he was silent, seeking words that might rid him of pursuit, yet not infect her.

She had stopped short before his silence. Smiling, now, on the background of mist, her eyes, her lips, her poise challenged him, incredulous, actually amused. “Don’t you think that I have an identity?” she asked.

He was willing at that to face her, for he saw suddenly and clearly,—it seemed to radiate from her in the smile, the look,—that he, apparently, couldn’t hurt her. She was too full of life to be in any danger from him, and perhaps the only way of ending pursuit was to fling wide the doors and, since she had said the word, show her the emptiness within.

“You force me to talk cheap metaphysics to you, Eppie, but I’ll try to say what I do think,” he said. “I believe that the illusion of a separate identity, self-directing and permanent, is the deepest and most tenacious of all illusions—the illusion that makes the wheels go round, the common illusion that makes the common mirage. The abolishing of the identity, of the self, is the final word of science, and of philosophy, and of religion, too. The determinism of science, the ecstatic immediacy of the mystic consciousness, the monistic systems of the Absolutists, all tend toward the final discovery that,—now I’m going to be very glib indeed,—but one must use the technical jargon,—that under all the transitory appearance is a unity in which, for which, diversity vanishes.”

Eppie no longer smiled. She had walked on while he spoke, her eyes on him, no longer amused or incredulous, with an air now of almost stern security.

“Odd,” she said presently, “that such a perverse and meaningless Whole should be made up of such significant fragments.”

“Ah, but I didn’t say that Reality was meaningless. It has all possible meaning for itself, no doubt; it’s our meaning for it that is so unpleasantly ambiguous. We are in it and for it, as if we were the kaleidoscope it turned, the picture it looked at; and we are and must be what it thinks or sees. Your musical simile expressed it very nicely: Reality an eternal symphony and our personalities the notes in it—discords to our own limited consciousness, but to Reality necessary parts of the perfect whole. Reality is just that will to contemplate, to think, the infinite variety of life, and it usually thinks us as wanting to live. All ethics, all religions, are merely records of the ceasing of this want. A man comes to see himself as discord, and with the seeing the discord is resolved to silence. One comes to see as the Reality sees, and since it is perfectly satisfied, although it is perhaps quite unconscious,—or so some people who think a great deal about it say,—we, in partaking of its vision, find in unconsciousness the goal, and are satisfied.”

“You are satisfied with such a death in life?” Eppie asked in her steady voice.

“What you call life is what I call death, perhaps, Eppie.”

“Your metaphysics may be very cheap; I know very little about them. But if all that were true, I should still say that the illusion is more real than that nothingness—for to us such a reality would be nothingness. And I should say, let us live our reality all the more intensely, since, for us, there is no other.”

“How you care for life,” said Gavan, as he had said it once before. He looked at her marching through the mist like a defiant Valkyrie.

“Care for it? I’ve hated it at times, the bits that came to me.”

“Yet you want it, always.”

“Always,” she repeated. “Always. I have passed a great part of my life in being very unhappy—that is to say, in wanting badly something I’ve not got. Yet I am more glad than I can say to have lived.”

“Probably because you still expect to get what you want.”

“Of course.” She smiled a little now, though a veiled, ambiguous smile. And as they began the steep descent, the mist infolding them more closely, even the semblance of the smile faded, leaving a new sadness.

“Poor Gavan,” she said.

He just hesitated. “Why?”

“Your religion is a hatred, a distrust of life; mine is trust in it, love of it. You see it as a sort of murderous uncle, beckoning to the babes in the wood; I own that I wouldn’t stir a step to follow it if I suspected it of such a character. And I see life—“ She paused here, looking down, musing, it seemed, on what she saw, and the pause grew long. In it, suddenly, Gavan knew again the invasion of emotion. Her downcast, musing face pervaded his consciousness with that sense of trembling. “You see life as what?” he asked her, not because he wanted to know, but because her words were always less to him than her silences.

Eppie, unconscious, was finding words.

“As something mysterious, beautiful. Something strange, yet near, like the thought of a mother about her unborn child, but, more still, like the thought of an unborn child about its unknown mother. We are such unborn children. And this something mysterious and beautiful says: Come; through thorns, over chasms, past terrors, and in darkness. So, one goes.”

Gavan was silent. Looking up at him, her eyes full of her own vision, she saw tears in his.

For a moment the full benignity, sweet, austere, of a maternal thing in her rested on him, so that it might have been she who said “Come.” Then, looking away from him again, knowing that she had seen more than he had meant to show, she said, “Own that if it’s all illusion, mine’s the best to live with.”

He had never seen her so beautiful as at this moment when she did not pursue, but looked away, quiet in her strength, and he answered mechanically, conscious only of that beauty, that more than beauty, alluring when it no longer pursued: “No; there are no thorns, nor chasms, nor terrors any longer for me. I am satisfied, Eppie.”

She was walking now, a little ahead of him, down the thread-like path that wound among phantom bracken. The islet of space where they could see seemed like a tiny ship gliding forward with them into a white, boundless ocean. Such, thought Gavan, was human life.

In a long silence he felt that her mood had changed. Over her shoulder she looked round at him at last with her eyes of the spiritual steeplechaser. “It’s war to the knife, Gavan.”

She hurt him in saying it. “You only have the knife,” he answered, and his gentleness might have reproached the sudden challenge.

“You have poison.”

“I never put it to your lips, dear.”

She saw his pain. “Oh, don’t be afraid for me,” she said. “I drink your poison, and it is a tonic, a wine, that fills me with greater ardor for the fight.”

IX

THEY were on the path that led to the deeply sunken garden gate, and they had not spoken another word while they followed it, while they stooped a little under the tangle of ivy that drooped from the stone lintel, while they went past the summer-house and on between the rows of withered plants and the empty, wintry spaces of the garden; only when they were nearly at the house, under the great pine-tree, did Eppie cheerfully surmise that they would be exactly on time for tea, and by her manner imply that tea was far more present to her thoughts than daggers or poison.

He felt that in some sense matters had been left in the lurch. He didn’t quite know where he stood for her with his disastrous darkness about him—whether she had really taken up a weapon for open warfare or whether she hadn’t wisely fallen back upon the mere pleasantness of friendly intercourse, turning her eyes away from his accompanying gloom.

He was glad to find her alone that evening after dinner when he had left the general in the smoking-room over a review and a cigar. Miss Barbara had gone early to bed, so that Eppie, in her white dress, as on the night of his arrival, had the dark brightness of the firelit room all to herself. He was glad, because the sense of uncertainty needed defining, and uncertainty, since that last moment of trembling, had been so acute that any sort of definition would be a relief.

An evening alone with her, now that they were really on the plane of mutual understanding, would put his vague fears to the test. He would learn whether they must be fled from or whether, as mere superficial tremors, tricks of the emotions, they could not be outfaced smilingly. He really didn’t want to run away, especially not until he clearly knew from what he ran.

Eppie sat before the fire on the low settle, laying down a book as he came in. In her aspect of exquisite worldliness, the white dress displaying her arms and shoulders with fashionable frankness, she struck him anew as being her most perfectly armed and panoplied self. Out on the windy hillside or singing among the woods, nature seemed partially to absorb and possess her, so that she became a part of the winds and woods; but indoors, finished and fine from head to foot, her mastered conventionality made her the more emphatically personal. She embodied civilization in her dress, her smile, her speech, her very being; the loose coils of her hair and the cut of her satin shoe were both significant of choice, of distinctive simplicity; and the very bareness of her shoulders—Gavan gave an amused thought to the ferociously sensitive Tolstoi—symbolized the armor of the world-lover, the world-user. It was she who possessed the charms and weapons of the civilization that crumbled to dust in the hand of the Russian mystic. He could see her confronting the ascetic’s eye with the challenge of her radiant and righteous self-assurance. Her whole aspect rebuilt that shattered world, its pomp and vanity, perhaps, its towering scale of values; each tier narrowing in its elimination of the lower, cruder, less conscious, more usual; each pinnacle a finely fretted flowering of the rare; a dazzling palace of foam. She embodied all that; but, more than all for Gavan, she embodied the deep currents of trust that flowed beneath the foam.

Her look welcomed him, though without a smile, as he drew a deep chair to the fire and sat down near her, and for a little while they said nothing, he watching her and she with gravely downcast eyes.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked at last.

“Of you, of course,” she answered. “About our talk this afternoon; we haven’t finished it yet.”

She, too, then, had felt uncertainty that needed relief.

“Are you sharpening your knife?”

She put aside his lightness. “Gavan, we are friends. May I talk as I like to you?”

“Of course you may. I’ve always shown you that.”

“No, you have tried to prevent me from talking. But now I will. I have been thinking. It seems to me that it is your life that has so twisted your mind; it has been so joyless.”

“Does that make it unusual?”

“You must love life before you can know it.”

“You must love it, and lose it, before you can know it. I have had joy, Eppie; I have loved life. My experience has not been peculiarly personal; it is merely the history of all thought, pushed far enough.”

“Of all mere thought, yes.”

She rested her head on her hand as she looked at him, seeming to wonder over him and his thought, his mere thought, dispassionately. “Don’t be shy, or afraid, for me. Why should you mind? I’ve given you my story; give me yours. Tell me about your life.”

He felt, suddenly, sunken there in his deep chair, passive and peaceful in the firelight, that it would be very easy to tell her. Why shouldn’t she see it all and understand it all? He couldn’t hurt her; it would be only a strange, a sorrowful picture to her; and to him, yes, there would be a relief in the telling. To speak, for the first time in his life—it would be like the strewing of rosemary on a grave, a commemoration that would have its sweetness and its balm.

But he hesitated, feeling the helplessness of his race before verbal self-expression.

Eppie lent him a hand.

“Begin with when you left me.”

“What was I then? I hardly remember. A tiresome, self-centered boy.”

“No; you weren’t self-centered. You believed in God, then, and you loved your mother. Why have both of them, as personalities, become illusions to you?”

She saw facts clearly and terribly. She was really inside the doors at last, and though it would be all the easier to make her understand the facts she saw, Gavan paled a little before the sudden, swift presence.

For, yes, God was gone, and yes,—worse, far worse, as he knew she felt it,—his mother, too—except as that ghost, that pang of memory.

She saw his pallor and helped him again, to the first and easier avowal.

“How did you lose your faith? What happened to you when you left me?”

“It’s a commonplace enough story, that.”

“Of course it is. But when loss of faith becomes permanent and permanently means a loss of feeling, it’s not so commonplace.”

“Oh, I think it is—more commonplace than people know, in temperaments as unvital and as logical as mine.”

“You are not unvital.”

“My reason isn’t often blurred by my instincts.”

“That is because you are strong—terribly strong. It’s not that your vitality is so little as that your thought is so abnormal.”

“No, no; it’s merely that I understand my own experience.”

But she had put his feet upon the road, and, turning his eyes from her as he looked, he contemplated its vista.

It was easy enough, after all, to gather into words that retrospect of the train; it was easy to be brief and lucid with such a comprehending listener,—to be very impersonal, too; simply to hold up before her eyes the picture that he saw.

His eyes met hers seldom while he told her all that was essential to her true seeing. It was wonderful, the sense of her secure, strong life that made it possible to tell her all.

The stages of his young, restless, tortured thought were swiftly sketched for an intelligence so quick, and the growing intuition of the capriciousness, the suffering of life. He only hesitated when it came to the reunion with his mother, the change that had crept between them; and her illness, her death; choosing his words with a reticence that bit them the more deeply into the listening mind.

But, in the days that followed the death,—days ghost-like, yet sharp,—he lingered, so that she paused with him in that pause of stillness in his life, that morning in the spring woods when everything had softly, gently shown an abiding strangeness. He told her all about that: about the look of the day, not knowing why he so wanted her to see it, too, but it seemed to explain more than anything else—the pale, high sky, the gray branches, the shining water and the little bird that hopped to drink. He himself looked ghost-like while he spoke—sunken, long, dark, impalpable, in the deep chair, his thin white fingers lightly interlocked, his face showing only the oddity of its strange yet beautiful oval and its shadowy eyes and lips. All whiteness and shadow, he might have been a projection from the thought of the woman, who, before him, leaned her head on her hand, warm, breathing, vivid with color, her steady eyes seeing phantoms unafraid.

After that there wasn’t much left to explain, it seemed—except Alice, that last convulsive effort of life to seize and keep him; and that didn’t take long—made, as it were, a little allegory, with nameless abstractions to symbolize the old drama of the soul entrameled and finally set free again. The experience of the spring woods had really been the decisive one. He came back to that again, at the end of his story. “It’s really, that experience, what in another kind of temperament is called conversion.”

Her eyes had looked away from him at last. “No,” she said, “conversion is something that gives life.”

“No,” he rejoined, “it’s something that lifts one above it.”

The fundamental contest spoke again, and after that they were both silent. He, too, had looked away from her when the story was over, and he knew, from her deep, slow breathing, that the story had meant a great deal to her. It was not a laboring breath, nor broken by pain to sighs; but it seemed, in its steady rhythm, to accept and then to conquer what he had put before her. That he should so hear it, not looking at her, filled the silence with more than words; and, as in the afternoon, he sought the relief of words.

“So you see,” he said, in his lighter voice, “thorns and precipices and terrors dissolve like dreams.” She had seen everything and he was ushering her out. But his eyes now met hers, looking across the little space at him.

“And I? Do I, too, dissolve like a dream?” she said.

His smile now was lighter than his voice had been. “Absolutely. Though I own that you are a highly colored phantom. Your color is very vivid indeed. Sometimes it almost masters my thought.”

He had not, in his mere wish for ease, quite known what he meant to say, and now her look did not show him any deepened consciousness; but, suddenly, he felt that under his lightness and her quiet the current ran deeply.

“I master your thought?” she repeated. “Doesn’t that make you distrust thought sometimes?”

“No,” he laughed. “It makes me distrust you, dear Eppie.”

There were all sorts of things before them now. What they were he really didn’t know; perhaps she didn’t, either. At all events he kept his eyes off them, and shaking his crossed foot a little, he still looked at her, smiling.

“Why?” she asked.

He felt that he must now answer her, and himself, in words that wouldn’t imply more than he could face.

“Well, the very force of your craving for life, the very force of your will, might sweep me along for a bit. I might be caught up for a whirl on the wheel of illusion; not that you could ever bind me to it: it would need my own will, blind again, for that.”

Her eyes had met his so steadily that he had imagined only contemplation or perhaps that maternal severity behind the steadiness. But the way in which they received these last tossed pebbles of metaphor showed him unrealized profundities. They deepened, they darkened, they widened on him. They seemed to engulf him in a sudden abyss of pain. And pain in her was indeed a color that could infect him.

“How horrible you are, Gavan,” she said, and her voice went with the words and with the look.

“Eppie!” he exclaimed on a tense, indrawn breath, as if over the sudden stab of a knife. “Have I hurt you?”

Her eyes turned from him. “Not what you say, or do. What you are.”

“You didn’t see, before, what I am?”

“Never—like this.”

He leaned toward her. “Dear Eppie, why do you make me talk? Let me be still. I only ask to be still.”

“You are worse still. Don’t you think I see what stillness means?”

She had pushed her low seat from him,—for he stretched his hands to her with his supplication,—and, rising to her feet, stepping back, she stood before the fire, somberly looking down at him.

Gavan, too, rose. Compunction, supplication, a twist of perplexity and suffering, made him careless of discretion. Face to face, laying his hands on her shoulders, he said: “Don’t let me frighten you. It would be horrible if I could convince you, shatter you.”

Standing erect under his hands, she looked hard into his face.

“You could frighten me, horribly; but you couldn’t shatter me. You are ambiguous, veiled, all in mists. I am as clear, as sharp—.”

Her dauntlessness, the old defiance, were a relief—a really delicious relief. He was able to smile at her, a smile that pled for reassurance. “How can I frighten you, then?”

Her somber gaze did not soften. “Your mists come round me, chill, suffocating. They corrode my clearness.”

“No; no; it’s you who come into them. Don’t. Don’t. Keep away from me.”

“I’m not so afraid of you as that,” she answered.

His hands were still on her shoulders and their eyes on each other—his with their appealing, uncertain smile, and hers unmoved, unsmiling; and suddenly that sense of danger came upon him: as if, in the mist, he felt upon him the breathing, warm, sweet, ominous, of some unseen creature. And in the fear was a strange delight, and like a hand drawn, with slow, deep pressure, across a harp, the nearness drew across his heart, stirring its one sad note—its dumb, its aching note—to a sudden ascending murmur of melody.

He was caught swiftly from this inner tumult by its reflection in her face. She flushed, deeply, painfully. She drew back sharply, pushing his hands from her.

Gavan sought his own equilibrium in an ignoring of that undercurrent.

“Now you are not frightened; but why are you angry?” he asked.

For a moment she did not speak.

“Eppie, I am so sorry. What is it? You are really angry, Eppie!”

Then, after that pause of speechlessness, she found words.

“If I think of you as mist you must not think of me as glamour.” This she gave him straight.

Only after disengaging her train from the settle, from his feet, after wheeling aside his chair to make a clear passage for her departure, did she add: “I have read your priggish Schopenhauer.”

She gave him no time for reply or protestation. Quite mistress of herself, leaving him with all the awkwardness of the situation—if he chose to consider it awkward—upon his hands, very fully the finished mondaine and very beautifully the fearless and assured nymph of the hillside, she went to the piano, turned and rejected, in looking over it, some music, and sitting down, striking a long, full chord, she began to sing, in her voice of frosty dawn, the old Scotch ballad.

He might go or listen as he liked. She had put him away, him and his mists, his ambiguous hold upon her, his ambiguous look at her. She sang to please herself as much as when she had gone up through the woodlands. And if the note of anger still thrilled in her voice she turned it to the uses of her song and made a higher triumph of sadness.

She was still singing when the general came in.

SHE had been quite right; she had seen with her perfect sharpness and clearness indeed, and no wonder that she had been angry. He himself saw clearly, directly the hand was off the harp. It was laughably simple. He was a man, she a woman; they were both young and she was beautiful. That summed it up, sufficiently and brutally; and no wonder, again, that she had felt such summing an offense. It wasn’t in the light of such summings that she regarded herself.

With him she had never, for a moment, made use of glamour. His was the rudimentary impulse, and Gavan’s sensitive cheek echoed her flush when he thought of it. Never again, he promised himself, after this full comprehension of it, should such an impulse dim their friendship. He would make it up to her by helping her to forget it.

But for all that, it was with the strangest mixture of relief and dismay that he found upon the breakfast-table next morning an urgent summons for his return home. It was the affable little rector of the parish in Surrey who wrote to tell him of his father’s sudden breakdown,—softening of the brain. When Eppie appeared, a little grave, but all clear composure, he was able to show her the letter and to tell her of his immediate departure with a composure as assured as her own, but he wondered, while he spoke, if to her also the parting would mean any form of relief. At all events, for her, it couldn’t mean any form of wrench.

Looking in swift glances at her face, while she questioned him about his father, suggested trains and nurses, and gave practical advice for his journey, he was conscious that the relief was the result of a pretty severe strain, and that though it was relieved it hadn’t stopped aching.

The very fact that Eppie’s narrow face, the hair brushed back from brow and temples, showed, in the clear morning light, more of its oddity than its beauty, made its charm cling the more closely. Her eyes looked small, her features irregular; he saw the cliff-like modeling of her temples, the cheeks, a little flat, pale, freckled; the long, queer lines of her chin. Bare, exposed, without a flicker of sunlight on her delicate analogies of ruggedness, of weather-beaten strength, she might almost have been called ugly; and, with every glance, he was feeling her as sweetness, sweetness deep and reticent, embodied.

The general and Miss Barbara were late. She poured out his coffee, saw him embarked on a sturdy breakfast, insisted, now with the irradiating smile that in a moment made her lovely, that he should eat a great deal before his journey, made him think anew of that maternal quality in her,—the tolerance, the tenderness. And in the ambiguous relief came the sharpened dismay of seeing how great was the cause for it.

He wanted to say a word, only one, about their little drama of last night, but the time didn’t really seem to come for it; perhaps she saw that it shouldn’t come. But on the old stone steps with their yellow lichen spots, his farewells over to the uncle and aunt, and he and Eppie standing out there in a momentary solitude, she said, shaking his hand, “Friends, you know. Look me up when you are next in London.” She had her one word to say, and she had said it when and how she wished. It wasn’t anything so crude as reassurance; it was rather a sunny assurance, in which she wished him to share, that none was needed.

He looked, like the boy of years ago, a real depth of gratitude into her eyes. She had given him his chance.

“I’ll never frighten you again; I’ll never displease you again.”

“I know you won’t. I won’t let you,” Eppie smiled.

“I wish I were more worth your while—worth your being kind to me.”

“You think you are still—gloomy, tiresome, self-centered?”

“That defines it well enough.”

“Well, you serve my purpose,” said Eppie, “and that is to have you for my friend.”

She seemed in this parting to have effaced all memory of glamour, but Gavan knew that the deeper one was with him.

It was with him, even while, in the long journey South, he was able to unwrap film after film of the mirage from its central core of reality, to see Eppie, in all her loveliness, in all her noblest aspects, as a sort of incarnation of the world, the flesh, and the devil. He could laugh over the grotesque analogy; it proved to him how far from life he was when its symbol could show in such unflattering terms, and yet it hurt him that he could find it in himself so to symbolize her. It was just because she was so lovely, so noble, that he must—he must—. For, under all, was the wrench that would take time to stop aching.

X

CAPTAIN PALAIRET had gone to pieces and was now as unpleasant an object as for years he had been a pleasant one.

Gavan’s atrophied selfishness felt only a slight shrinking from the revolting aspects of dissolution, and his father’s condition rather interested him. The captain’s childish clinging to his son was like an animal instinct suddenly asserting itself, an almost vegetable instinct, so little more than mere instinct was it. It affected Gavan much as the suddenly contracting tentacles of a sea-anemone upon his finger might have done. He was not at all touched; but he felt the claim of a possible pang of loneliness and desolation in the dimness of decay, and, methodically, with all the appearances of a solicitous kindness, he responded to the claim.

The man, immersed in his rudimentary universe of sense, showed a host of atavistic fears; fears of the dark, of strange faces, fears of sudden noises or of long stillness. He often wept, leaning his swollen face on Gavan’s shoulder, filled with an abject self-pity.

“You know how I love you, Gavan,” he would again and again repeat, his lax lips fumbling with the words, “always loved you, ever since you were a little fellow—out in India, you know. I and your dear mother loved you better than life,” and, wagging his head, he would repeat, “better than life,” and break into sobs—sobs that ceased when the nurse brought him his wine-jelly. Then it might be again the tone of feeble whining. “It doesn’t taste right, Gavan. Can’t you make it taste right? Do you want to starve me between you all?”

Gavan, with scientific scrutiny, diagnosed and observed while he soothed him or engaged his vagrant mind in games.

In his intervals of leisure he pursued his own work, and rode and walked with all his usual tempered athleticism. He did not feel the days as a strain, hardly as disagreeable; he was indifferent or interested. At the worst he was bored. The undercurrent of pity he was accustomed to living with.

Only at night, in hours of rest, he would sink into a half-dazed disgust, find himself on edge, nearly worn out. So the winter passed.

He was playing draughts with his father on a day in earliest spring, when he was told that Mrs. Arley and Miss Gifford were below.

Gavan was feeling dull and jaded. The conducting of the game needed a monotonous patience and tact. The captain would now pick up a draught and gaze curiously at it for long periods of time, now move in a direction contrary to all the rules of the game and to his own advantage. When such mistakes were pointed out to him he would either apologize humbly or break into sudden peevish wrath. To-day he was in a peculiarly excitable condition and had more than once wept.

Gavan, after the servant’s announcement, holding a quietly expectant draught in his thin, poised fingers, looked hard at the board that still waited for his father’s move. He then felt that a deep flush had mounted to his face.

In spite of the one or two laconic letters that they had interchanged, Eppie had been relegated for many months to her dream-place—a dream, in spite of its high coloring, more distant than this nearer dream of ugly illness. It was painful to look back at the queer turmoil she had roused in him during the autumnal fortnight, and more painful to realize, as in his sudden panic of reluctance now, that, though a dream, she was an abiding and constant one.

Mrs. Arley he knew, and her motor-car had recently made her a next-door neighbor in spite of the thirty miles between them. She was a friend with whom Eppie had before stayed on the other side of the county. Nothing could be more natural than that she and Eppie should drop in upon a solitude that must, to their eyes, have all the finished elements of pathos. Yet he was a little vexed by the intrusion, as well as reluctant to meet it.

His father broke into vehement protest when he heard that he was to be abandoned at an unusual hour, and it needed some time for Gavan and the nurse to quiet him. Twenty minutes had passed before he could go down to his guests, and he surmised that they would feel in this delay yet further grounds for pity.

They were in the hall, before a roaring fire, Eppie standing with her back to it, in a familiar attitude, though her long, caped cloak and hooded motoring-cap, the folds of gray silk gathered under her chin and narrowly framing her face, gave her an unfamiliar aspect. Her eyes met his as he turned the spacious staircase and came down to them, and he felt that they watched his every movement and noted every trace in him of fatigue and dejection.

Mrs. Arley, fluent, flexible, amazingly pretty, for all the light powdering and wrinkling of her fifty years, came rustling forward.

“Eppie is staying with me for the week-end,—I wrench her from her slums now and then,—and we wanted to hear how you are, to see how you are. You look dreadfully fagged; doesn’t he, Eppie? How is your father?”

Eppie gave him her hand in silence.

“My father will never be any better, you know,” he said. “As for me, I’m all right. I should have come over to see you before this, and looked you up, too, Eppie, but I can’t get away for more than an hour or so at a time.”

He led them into the library while he spoke,—Mrs. Arley exclaiming that such devotion was dear and good of him,—and Eppie looked gravely round at the room that he had described to her as the room that he really passed his life in. The great spaces of ranged books framed for her, he knew, pictures of his own existence. He knew, too, that her gravity was the involuntary result of the impression that he made upon her. She was sorry for him. Poor Eppie, their relationship since childhood seemed to have consisted in that—in the sense of her pursuing pity and in his retreat before it, for her sake. He retreated now, as he knew, in his determination to show her that pity was misplaced, uncalled for.

Mrs. Arley had thrown off her wrap and loosened her hood in a manner that made it almost imperative to ask them to stay with him for lunch—an invitation accepted with an assurance showing that it had been expected, and it wasn’t difficult, in conventional battledore and shuttlecock with her, to show a good humor and frivolity that discountenanced pathetic interpretations. What Mrs. Arley’s interpretations were he didn’t quite know; her eyes, fatigued yet fresh, were very acute behind their trivial meanings, and he could wonder if Eppie had shared with her her own sense of his “horribleness,” and if, in consequence, her conception of Eppie’s significance as the opponent of that quality was tinged with sentimental associations.

Eppie’s gaze, while they rattled on, lost something of its gravity, but he was startled, as if by an assurance deeper than any of Mrs. Arley’s, when she rose to slip off her coat and went across the room to a small old mirror that hung near the door to take off her cap as well.

In her manner of standing there with her back to them, untying her veils, pushing back her hair, was the assurance, indeed, of a person whose feet were firmly planted on certain rights, all the more firmly for “knowing her place” as it were, and for having repudiated mistaken assumptions. She might almost have been a new sick-nurse come to take up her duties by his side. She passed from the mirror to the writing-table, examining the books laid there, and then, until lunch was announced, stood looking out of the window. Quite the silent, capable, significant new nurse, with many theories of her own that might much affect the future.

The dining-room at Cheylesford Lodge opened on a wonderful old lawn, centuries in its green. Bordered by beds, just alight with pale spring flowers, it swept in and out among shrubberies of rhododendron and laurel, the emerald nook set in a circle of trees, a high arabesque on the sky.

Eppie from her seat at the table faced the sky, the trees, the lawn. What a beautiful place, she was thinking. A place for life, sheltered, embowered. How she would have loved, as a child, those delicious rivulets of green that ran into the thick mysteries of shadow. How she would have loved to play dolls on a hot summer afternoon in the shade of the great yew-tree that stretched its dark branches half across the sky. The house, the garden, made her think of children; she saw white pinafores and golden heads glancing in and out among the trees and shrubs, and the vision of young life, blossoming, growing in security and sunlight, filled her thought with its pictured songs of innocence, while, at the same time, under the vision, she was feeling it all—all the beauty and sheltered sweetness—as dreadful in its emptiness, its worse than emptiness: a casket holding a death’s-head. She came back with something of a start to hear her work in the slums enthusiastically described by Mrs. Arley. “I thought it was only in novels that children clung to the heroine’s skirts. I never believed they clung in real life until seeing Eppie with her ragamuffins; they adore her.”

This remark, to whose truth she assented by a vague smile, gave Eppie’s thoughts a further push that sent them seeing herself among the golden heads and white pinafores on the lawn at Cheylesford Lodge; and though the vision maintained its loving aunt relationship of the slums, there was now a throb and flutter in it, as though she held under her hand a strange wild bird that only her own will not to look kept hidden.

These dreams were followed by a nightmare little episode.

In the library, again, the talk was still an airy dialogue, Eppie, her eyes on the flames as she drank her coffee, still maintaining her ruminating silence. In the midst of her thoughts and their chatter, the door opened suddenly and Captain Palairet appeared on the threshold.

His head neatly brushed, a sumptuous dressing-gown of padded and embroidered silk girt about him, he stood there with moist eyes and lips, faintly and incessantly shaking through all his frame, a troubling and startling figure.

Gavan had been wondering all through the visit how his father was bearing the abandonment, and his appearance, he saw now, must have been the triumphant fruit of contest with the nurse whose face of helpless disapprobation hovered outside.

Gavan went to his side, and, leaning on his son’s arm, the captain said that he had come to pay his respects to Mrs. Arley and to Miss Gifford.

Taking Mrs. Arley’s hand, he earnestly reiterated his pleasure in welcoming her to his home.

“Gavan’s in fact, you know; but he’s a good son. Not very much in common, perhaps: Gavan was always a book-worm, a fellow of fads and theories; I love a broad life, men and things. No, not much in common, except our love for his mother, my dear, dead wife; that brought us together. We shook hands over her grave, so to speak,” said the captain, but without his usual sentiment. An air of jaunty cheerfulness pervaded his manner. “She is buried near here, you know. You may have seen the grave. A very pretty stone; very pretty indeed. Gavan chose it. I was in India at the time. A great blow to me. I never recovered from it. I forget, for the moment, what the text is; but it’s very pretty; very appropriate. I knew I could trust Gavan to do everything properly.”

Gavan’s face had kept its pallid calm.

“You will tire yourself, father,” he said. “Let me take you up-stairs now. Mrs. Arley and Miss Gifford will excuse us.”

The captain resisted his attempt to turn him to the door.

“Miss Gifford. Yes, Miss Gifford,” he repeated, turning to where Eppie stood attentively watching father and son, “But I want to see Miss Elspeth Gifford. It was that I came for.” He took her hand and his wrecked and restless eyes went over her face. “So this is Miss Elspeth Gifford.”

“You have heard of me?” Eppie’s composure was as successful as Gavan’s own and lent to the scene a certain matter-of-fact convention.

The captain bowed low. “Heard of you? Yes. I have often heard of you. I am glad, glad and proud, to meet at last so much goodness and wit and beauty. You have a name in the world, Miss Gifford. Yes, indeed, I have heard of you.” Suddenly, while he held her hand and gazed at her, his look changed. Tears filled his eyes; a muscle in his lip began to shake; a flush of maudlin indignation purpled his face.

“And you are the girl my son jilted! And you come to our house! It’s a noble action. It’s a generous action. It’s worthy of you, my dear.” He tightly squeezed her hand, Gavan’s attempt—and now no gentle one—to draw him away only making his clutch the more determined.

“No, Gavan, I will not go. I will speak my mind. This is my hour. The time has come for me to speak my mind. Let’s have the truth; truth at all costs is my motto. A noble and generous action. But, my dear,” he leaned his head toward her and spoke in a loud whisper, “you’re well rid of him, you know—well rid of him. Don’t try to patch it up. Don’t come in that hope. So like a woman—I know, I know. But give it up; that’s my advice. Give it up. He’s a poor fellow—a very poor fellow. He wouldn’t make you happy; just take that from me—a friend, a true friend. He wouldn’t make any woman happy. He’s a poor creature, and a false creature, and I’ll say this,” the captain, now trembling violently, burst into tears: “if he has been a false lover to you he has been a bad son to me.”

With both hands, sobbing, he clung to her, while, with a look of sick distress, Gavan tried, not too violently, to draw him from his hold on her.

Eppie had not flushed. “Don’t mind,” she said, glancing at the helpless son, “he has mixed it up, you see.” And, bending on the captain eyes severe in kindly intention, like the eyes of a nurse firmly administering a potion, “You are mistaken about Gavan. It was another man who jilted me. Now let him take you up-stairs. You are ill.”

But the captain still clung, she, erect in her spare young strength, showing no shrinking of repulsion. “No, no,” he said; “you always try to shield him. A woman’s way. He won your heart, and then he broke it, as he has mine. He has no heart, or he’d take you now. Give it up. Don’t come after him. Sir, how dare you! I won’t submit to this. How dare you, Sir!” Gavan had wrenched him away, and in a flare of silly passion he struck at him again and again, like a furious child. It was a wrestle with the animal, the vegetable thing, the pinioning of vicious tentacles. Mrs. Arley fluttered in helpless consternation, while Eppie, firm and adequate, assisted Gavan in securing the wildly striking hands. Caught, held, haled toward the door, the captain became, with amazing rapidity, all smiles and placidity.

“Gently, gently, my dear boy. This is unseemly, you know, very childish indeed. Temper! Temper! You get it from me, no doubt—though your mother could be very spiteful at moments. I’ll come now. I’ve said my say. Well rid of him, my dear, well rid of him,” he nodded from the door.

“Eppie! My dear!” cried Mrs. Arley, when father and son had disappeared. “How unutterably hateful. I am more sorry for him than for you, Eppie. His face!”

Eppie was shrugging up her shoulders and straightening herself as though the captain’s grasp still threatened her.

“Hateful indeed; but trivial. Gavan understands that I understand. We must make him feel that it’s nothing.”

“He’s quite mad, horrible old man.”

“Not quite; more uncomfortably muddled than mad. We must make him see that we think nothing of it,” Eppie repeated. She turned to Gavan, who entered as she spoke, still with his sick flush and showing a speechless inability to frame apologies.

“This is what it is to have echoes, Gavan,” she said. “My little misfortunes have reached your father’s ears.” She went to him, she took his hand, she smiled at him, all her radiance recovered, a garment of warmth and ease to cover the shivering the captain’s words might have made. “Please don’t mind. I wasn’t a bit bothered, really.”

He could almost have wept for the relief of her smile, her sanity. The linking of their names in such an unthinkable connection had given him the nausea qualm of a terrifying obsession. He could find now only trite words in which to tell her that she was very kind and that he was more sorry than he could say.

“But you mustn’t be. It was such an obvious muddle for a twisted mind. He knew,” said Eppie, still smiling with the healing radiance, “that I had been jilted, and he knew that I was very fond of you, and he put together the one and one make two that happened to be before him.” She saw that his distress had been far greater than her own, that she now gave him relief.

Afterward, as she and Mrs. Arley sped away, her own reaction from the healing attitude showed in a rather grim silence. She leaned back in the swift, keen air, her arms folded in the fullness of her capes.

But Mrs. Arley could not repress her own accumulations of feeling. “My dear Eppie,” she said, her hand on her shoulder, and with an almost more than maternal lack of reticence, “I want you to marry him. Don’t glare Medusa at me. I hate tact and silences. Heaven knows I would have scouted the idea of such a match for you before seeing him to-day. But my hard old heart is touched. He is such a dear; so lonely. It’s a nice little place, too, and there is some money. Jim Grainger is too drab-colored a person for you,—all his force, all his sheckles, can’t gild him,—and Kenneth Langley is penniless. This dear creature is not a bit drab and not quite penniless. And you are big enough to marry a man who needs you rather than one you need. Will you think of it, Eppie?”

“Grace, you are worse than Captain Palairet,” said Eppie, whose eyes were firmly fixed on the neat leather back of the chauffeur in front of them.

“Don’t be cross, Eppie. Why should you mind my prattle?”

“Because I care for him so much.”

“Well, that’s what I say.”

“No; not as I mean it.”

“He of course cares, as I mean it.”

Eppie did not pause over this.

“It’s something different, quite different, from anything else in the world. It can’t be talked about like that. Please, Grace, never, never be like Captain Palairet again. You haven’t softening of the brain. I shall lose Gavan if my friends and his father have such delusions too openly.”

XI

GAVAN went down the noisy, dirty thoroughfare, looking for the turning which would lead him, so the last policeman consulted said, to Eppie’s little square.

It was a May day, suddenly clear after rain, liquid mud below, and above a sharply blue sky, looking its relentless contrast at the reeking, sordid streets, the ugly, hurrying life of the wide thoroughfare.

All along the gutter was a vociferous fringe of dripping fruit-and food-barrows, these more haphazard conveniences faced by a line of gaudy, glaring shops.

The blue above was laced with a tangle of tram-wires and cut with the jagged line of chimney-pots.

The roaring trams, the glaring shops, seemed part of a cruel machinery creative of life, and the grim air of permanence, the width and solidity of the great thoroughfare, were more oppressive to Gavan’s nerves, its ugliness fiercer, more menacing, than the narrower meanness of the streets where life seemed to huddle with more despondency.

In one of these he found that he had, apparently, lost his way.

A random turn brought him to a squalid court with sloping, wet pavement and open doors disgorging, from inner darkness, swarms of children. They ran; tottered on infantile, bandy legs; locked in scuffling groups, screaming shrilly, or squatted on the ground, absorbed in some game.

Gavan surveyed them vaguely as he wandered seeking an outlet. His eye showed neither shrinking nor tenderness, rather a bleak, hard, unmoved pity, like that of the sky above. He was as alien from that swarming, vivid life as the sky; but, worn as he was with months of nervous overstrain, he felt rising within him now and then a faint sense of nausea such as one might feel in contemplating a writhing clot of maggots.

He threaded his way among them all, and at a corner of the court found a narrow exit. This covered passage led, apparently, to another and fouler court, and emerging from it, coming suddenly face to face with him, was Eppie. She was as startling, seen here, as “a lily in the mouth of Tartarus,” and he had a shock of delight in her mere aspect. For Eppie was as exquisite as a flower. Her garments had in no way adapted themselves to mud and misery. Her rough dress of Japanese blue showed at the open neck of its jacket a white linen blouse; her short, kilted skirt swung with the grace of petals; her little upturned cap of blue made her look like a Rosalind ready for a background of woodland glade, streams, and herds of deer.

And here she stood, under that cruel sky, among the unimaginable ugliness of this City of Dreadful Night.

In her great surprise she did not smile, saying, as she gave him her hand, “Gavan! by all that’s wonderful!”

“You asked me to come and see you when I was next in London.”

“So I did.”

“So here I am. I had a day off by chance; some business that had to be seen to.”

“And your father?”

“Slowly going.”

“And you have come down here, for how long?”

“For as long as you’ll keep me. I needn’t go back till night.”

Her eye now wandered away from him to the maggots, one of whom, Gavan observed, had attached itself to her skirt, while a sufficiently dense crowd surrounded them, staring.

“You have a glimpse of our children,” said Eppie, surveying them with, not exactly a maternal, but, as it were, a fraternal eye of affectionate familiarity.

“What’s that, Annie?” in answer to a husky whisper. “Do I expect you to-night? Rather! Is that the doll, Ada? Well, I can’t say that you’ve kept it very tidy. Where’s its pinafore?” She took the soiled object held up to her and examined its garments. “Where’s its petticoat?”

“Please, Miss, Hemly took them.”

“Took them away from you?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“For her own doll, I suppose.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Eppie cogitated. “I’ll speak to Emily about it presently. You shall have them back.”

“Please, Miss, I called her a thief.”

“You spoke the truth. How are you, Billy? You look decidedly better. Gavan, my hands are full for the next hour or so and I can’t even offer to take you with me, for I’m going to sick people. But I shall be back and through with all my work by tea-time, if you don’t mind going to my place and waiting. You’ll find Maude Allen there. She lives down here, and with me when I am here. She is a nice girl, though she will talk your head off.”

“How do I find her? I don’t mind waiting.”

“You follow this to the end, take the first turning to the right, and that will bring you to my place. I’ll meet you there at five.”

Gavan, thus directed, made his way to the dingy little house occupied by the group of energetic women whom Eppie joined yearly for her three months of—dissipation? he asked himself, amused by her variegated vigor.

The dingy little house looked on a dingy little square—shell of former respectable affluence from which the higher form of life had shriveled. The sooty trees were thickly powdered with young green, and uneven patches of rough, unkempt grass showed behind broken iron railings. A cat’s-meat man called his dangling wares along the street, and Gavan, noticing a thin and furtive cat, that stole from a window-ledge, stopped him and bought a large three-penny-worth, upon which he left the cat regaling itself with an odd, fastidious ferocity.

He entered another world when he entered Eppie’s sitting-room. Here was life at its most austerely sweet. Books lined the walls, bowls of primroses and delicate Japanese bronzes set above their shelves; chintz-covered chairs were drawn before the fire; the latest reviews lay on a table, and on the piano stood open music; there were wide windows in the little room, and crocuses, growing in flat, earthenware dishes, blew out their narrow chalices against the sunlit muslin curtains.

Miss Allen sat sewing near the crocuses, and, shy and voluble, rose to greet him. She was evidently accustomed to Eppie’s guests—accustomed, too, perhaps, to taking them off her hands, for though she was shy her volubility showed a familiarity with the situation. She was almost as funny a contrast to Eppie as the slum children had been an ugly one. She wore a spare, drab-colored skirt and a cotton shirt, its high, hard collar girt about by a red tie that revealed bone buttons before and behind. Her sleek, fair hair, relentlessly drawn back, looked like a varnish laid upon her head. Her features, at once acute and kindly, were sharp and pink.

She was sewing on solid and distressingly ugly materials.

“Yes, I am usually at home. Miss Gifford is the head and I am the hands, you see,” she smiled, casting quick, upward glances at the long, pale young man in his chair near the fire. “Miss Henderson, Miss Grey, and I live here all year round, and I do so look forward to Miss Gifford’s coming. Oh, yes, it’s a most interesting life. Do you do anything of the sort? Are you going to take up a club? Perhaps you are going into the Church?”

Miss Allen asked her swift succession of questions as if in a mild desperateness.

Gavan admitted that his interest was wholly in Miss Gifford.

“She is interesting,” Miss Allen, all comprehension, agreed. “So many people find her inspiring. Do you know Mr. Grainger, the M.P.? He comes here constantly. He is a cousin, you know. He has known her, of course, ever since she was a child. I think it’s very probable that she influences his political life—oh, quite in a right sense, I mean. He is such a conscientious man—everybody says that. And then she isn’t at all eccentric, you know, as so many fashionable women who come down here are; they do give one so much trouble when they are like that,—all sorts of fads that one has to manage to get on with. She isn’t at all faddish. And she isn’t sentimental, either. I think the sentimental ones are worst—for the people, especially, giving them all sorts of foolish ideas. And it’s not that she doesn’t care. She cares such a lot. That’s the secret of her not getting discouraged, you see. She never loses her spirit.”

“Is it such discouraging work?” Gavan questioned from his chair. With his legs crossed, his hat and stick held on his knee, he surveyed Miss Allen and the crocuses.

“Well, not to me,” she answered; “but that’s very different, for I have religious faith. Miss Gifford hasn’t that, so of course she must care a great deal to make up for it. When one hasn’t a firm faith it is far more difficult, I always think, to see any hope in it all. I think she would find it far easier if she had that. She can’t resign herself to things. She is rather hot-tempered at times,” Miss Allen added, with one of her sharp, shy glances.

Gavan, amused by the idea that Eppie lacked religious faith, inquired whether the settlement were religious in intention, and Miss Allen sighed a little in answering no,—Miss Grey, indeed, was a Positivist. “But we Anglicans are very broad, you know,” she said. “I can work in perfectly with them all—better with Miss Grey and Miss Gifford than with Miss Henderson, who is very, very Low. Miss Gifford goes in more for social conditions and organization—trades-unions, all that sort of thing; that’s where she finds Mr. Grainger so much of a help, I think.” And he gathered from Miss Allen’s further conversation, from its very manner of vague though admiring protest, a clearer conception of Eppie’s importance down here. To Miss Allen, she evidently embodied a splendid, pagan force, ambiguous in its splendor. He saw her slightly shrinking vision of an intent combatant; no loving sister of charity, but a young Bellona, the latest weapons of sociological warfare in her hands, its latest battle-cry on her lips. And all for what? thought Gavan, while, with a sense of contrasting approval, he looked at Miss Allen’s tidy little head against the sunlit crocuses and watched the harmless occupation of her hands. All for life, more life; the rousing of desire; the struggling to higher forms of consciousness. She was in it, the strife, the struggle. He had seen on her face to-day, with all its surprise, perhaps its gladness, that alien look of grave preoccupation that passed from him to the destinies she touched. In thinking of it all he felt particularly at peace, though there was the irony of his assurance that Eppie’s efforts among this suffering life where he found her only resulted in a fiercer hold on suffering. Physical degradation and its resultant moral apathy were by no means the most unendurable of human calamities. Miss Allen’s anodynes—the mere practical petting, soothing, telling of pretty tales—were, in their very short-sightedness, more fitted to the case.

Miss Allen little thought to what a context her harmless prattle was being adjusted. She would have been paralyzed with horror could she have known that to the gentle young man, sitting there so unalarmingly, she herself was only a rather simple symptom of life that he was quietly studying. In so far from suspecting, her shyness went from her; he was so unalarming—differing in this from so many people—that she found it easy to talk to him. And she still had a happy little hope of a closer community of interest than he had owned to. He looked, she thought, very High Church. Perhaps he was in the last stages of conversion.

She had talked on for nearly an hour when another visitor was announced. This proved to be a young man slightly known to Gavan, a graceful, mellifluous youth, whose artificiality of manner and great personal beauty suggested a mingling of absinthe and honey. People had rather bracketed Gavan and Basil Mayburn together; one could easily deal with both as lumped in the same category,—charming drifters, softly disdainful of worldly aims and efforts. Mayburn himself took sympathy for granted, though disconcerted at times by finding his grasp of the older man to be on a sliding, slippery surface. Palairet had, to be sure, altogether the proper appreciations of art and literature, the rhythm of highly evolved human intercourse; the aroma distilled for the esthete from the vast tragic comedy of life; so that he had never quite satisfied himself as to why he could get no nearer on this common footing. Palairet was always charming, always interested, always courteous; but one’s hold did slip.

And to Gavan, Basil Mayburn, with his fluent ecstasies, seemed a sojourner in a funny half-way house. To Mayburn the hallucination of life was worth while esthetically. His own initial appeal to life had been too fundamentally spiritual for the beautiful to be more to him than a second-rate illusion.

Miss Allen greeted Mr. Mayburn with a coolness that at once discriminated for Gavan between her instinctive liking for himself and her shrinking from a man who perplexed and displeased her.

Mayburn was all glad sweetness: delighted to see Miss Allen; delighted to see Palairet; delighted to wait in their company for the delightful Miss Gifford; and, turning to Miss Allen, he went on to say, as a thing that would engage her sympathies, that he had just come from a service at the Oratory.

“I often go there,” he said; “one gets, as nowhere else that I know of in London, the quintessence of aspiration—the age-long yearning of the world. How are your schemes for having that little church built down here succeeding? I do so believe in it. Don’t let any ugly sect steal a march on you.”

Miss Allen primly replied that the plans for the church were prospering; and adding that Miss Gifford would be here in a moment and that she must leave them, she gathered up her work and departed with some emphasis.

“Nice, dear little creature, that,” said Mayburn, “though she does so dislike me. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I never quite know how far her Anglicanism goes; such a pity that it doesn’t go a little further and carry her into a nunnery of the Catholic Church. She is the nun type. She ought to be done up in their delicious costume; it would lend her the flavor she lacks so distressingly now. Did you notice her collar and her hair? Astonishing the way that Eppie makes use of all these funny, guindÉe creatures whom she gets hold of down here. Have you ever seen Miss Grey?—dogmatic, utilitarian, strangely ugly Miss Grey, another nun type corrupted by our silly modern conditions. She reeks of Comte and looks like a don. And all the rest of them,—the solemn humanitarians, the frothy socialists, the worldly, benign old ecclesiastics,—Eppie works them all; she has a genius for administration. It’s an art in her. It almost consoles one for seeing her wasted down here for so much of the year.”

“Why wasted?” Gavan queried. “She enjoys it.”

“Exactly. That’s the alleviation. Wasted for us, I mean. You have known her for a long time, haven’t you, Palairet?”

Gavan, irked by the question and by the familiarity of Mayburn’s references to their absent hostess, answered dryly that he had known Miss Gifford since childhood; and Mayburn, all tact, passed at once to less personal topics, inquiring with a new earnestness whether Palairet had seen Selby’s Goya, and expatiating on its exquisite horror until the turning of a key in the hall-door, quick steps on the stairs leading up past the sitting-room, announced Eppie’s arrival.

She was with them in a moment, cap and jacket doffed, her muddy shoes changed for slender patent-leather, fresh in her white blouse. She greeted Mayburn, turning to Gavan with, “I’m so glad you waited. You shall both have tea directly.”

With all her crisp kindliness, Gavan fancied a change in her since the greeting of an hour and a half before. Things hadn’t gone well with her. And he could flatter himself, also, with the suspicion that she was vexed at finding their tÊte-À-tÊte interrupted.

Mayburn loitered about the room after her while she straightened the shade on the student’s lamp, just brought in, and made the tea, telling her about people, about what was going on in the only world that counted, telling her about Chrissie Bentworth’s astounding elopement, and, finally, about the Goya. “You really must see it soon,” he assured her.

Eppie, adjusting the flame of her kettle, said that she didn’t want to see it.

“You don’t care for Goya, dear lady?”

“Not just now.”

“Well, of course I don’t mean just now. I mean after you have burned out this particular flame. But, really, it’s a sensation before you and you mustn’t miss having it. An exquisite thing. Horror made beautiful.”

“I don’t want to see it made beautiful,” Eppie, with cheerful rudeness, objected.

“Now that,” said Mayburn, drawing up to the tea-table with an appreciative glance for the simple but inviting fare spread upon it—“now that is just where I always must argue with you. Don’t you agree with me, Palairet, that life is beautiful—that it’s only in terms of beauty that it has significance?”

“If you happen to see it so,” Gavan ambiguously assented.

“Exactly; I accept your amendment—if you happen to have the good fortune to see it so; if you have the faculty that gives the vision; if, like Siegfried, the revealing dragon’s-blood has touched your lips. Eppie has the gift and shouldn’t wilfully atrophy it. She shouldn’t refuse to share the vision of the Supreme Artist, to whom all horror and tragedy are parts of the picture that his eternal joy contemplates; she should not refuse to listen with the ear of the Supreme Musician, to whom all the discords that each one of us is, before we taste the dragon’s-blood,—for what is man but a dissonance, as our admirable Nietzsche says,—to whom all these discords melt into the perfect phrase. All art, all truth is there. I’m rather dithyrambic, but, in your more reticent way, you agree with me, don’t you, Palairet?”

Eppie’s eye, during this speech, had turned with observant irony upon Gavan.

“How do you like your echo, Gavan?” she inquired, and she answered for him: “Of course he agrees, but in slightly different terms. He doesn’t care a fig about the symphony or about the Eternal Goya. There isn’t a touch of the ‘lyric rapture’ about him. Now pray don’t ask him to define his own conceptions, and drink your tea. And don’t say one word to me, either, about your gigantic, Bohemian deity. You have spoken of Nietzsche, and I know too well what you are coming to: the Apollonian spirit of the world of Appearances in which the Dionysiac spirit of Things-in-Themselves mirrors its vital ecstasy. Spare me, I’m not at all in the humor to see horror in terms of loveliness.”

“Ay de mi!” Mayburn murmured, “you make me feel that I’m still a dissonance when you talk like this.”

“A very wholesome realization.”

“You are cross with life to-day, and therefore with me, its poor little appreciator.”

“I’m never cross with life.”

“Only with me, then?”

“Only with you, to-day.”

Mayburn, folding his slice of bread-and-butter, took her harshness with Apollonian serenity. “At least let me know that I’ve an ally in you,” he appealed to Gavan, while Eppie refilled her cup with the business-like air of stoking an engine that paused for a moment near wayside trivialities.

Gavan had listened to the dithyrambics with some uneasiness, conscious of Eppie’s observation, and now owned that he felt little interest in the Eternal Goya.

“Don’t, don’t, I pray of you, let him take the color out of life for you,” Mayburn pleaded, turning from this rebuff, tea-cup in hand, to Eppie; and Eppie, with a rather grim smile, again full of reminiscences for Gavan, declared that neither of them could take anything out of it for her.

She kept, after that, the talk in pleasant enough shallows; but Mayburn fancied, more than once, that he heard the grating of his keel on an unpropitious shore. Eppie didn’t want him to-day, that was becoming evident; she wasn’t going to push him off into decorative sailing. And presently, wondering a little if his tact had already been too long at fault, wondering anew about the degree of intimacy between the childhood friends, who had, evidently, secrets in which he did not share, he gracefully departed.

Eppie leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and closed her eyes as though to give herself the relief of a long silence.

Her hair softly silhouetted against the green shade and the flickering illumination of the firelight upon her, her passive face showed a stern wistfulness. Things had gone wrong with her.

Looking at her, Gavan’s memory went back to the last time they had been together, alone, in firelight, to his impulse and her startlingly acute interpretation of it. Her very aspect now, her closed eyes and folded arms, seemed to show him how completely she disowned, for both of them, even the memory of such an unfitting episode. More keenly than ever he recognized the fineness in her, the generosity, the willingness to outlive trifles, to put them away forever; and the contagion of her somber peace enveloped him.

She remarked presently, not opening her eyes: “I should like to make a bon-fire of all the pictures in the world, all the etchings, the carvings, the tapestries, the bric-À-brac in general,—and Basil Mayburn, in sackcloth and ashes, should light it.”

“What puritanic savagery, Eppie!”

“I prefer the savage puritan to the Basil Mayburn type; at least I do just now.”

“What’s the matter?” Gavan asked, after a little pause.

“Do I show it so evidently?” she asked, with a faint smile. “Everything is the matter.”

“What, in particular, has gone wrong?”

Eppie did not reply at first, and he guessed that she chose only to show him a lesser trouble when she said, “I’ve had a great quarrel with Miss Grey, for one thing.”

“The positivistic lady?”

“Yes; did Maude tell you that? She really is a very first-rate person—and runs this place; but I lost my temper with her—a stupid thing to do, and not suddenly, either, which made it the less excusable.”

“Are your theories so different that you came to a clash?”

“Of course they are different, though it was apparently only over a matter of practical administration that we fought.” Eppie drew a long breath, opening her eyes. “I shall stay on here this spring—I usually go to my cousin Alicia for the season. But one can’t expect things to go as one wants them unless one keeps one’s hand on the engine most of the time. She has almost a right to consider me a meddling outsider, I suppose. I shall stay on till the end of the summer.”

“And smash Miss Grey?”

Eppie, aware of his amusement, turned an unresentful glance upon him.

“No, don’t think me merely brutally dominant. I really like her. I only want to use her to the best advantage.”

At this he broke into a laugh. “Not brutally dominant, I know; but I’m sorry for Miss Grey.”

“Miss Grey can well take care of herself, I assure you.”

“What else has gone wrong?”

Again Eppie chose something less wrong to show him. “The factory where some of my club-girls work has shut down half of its machinery. There will be a great deal of suffering. And we have pulled them above a flippant acceptance of state relief.”

“And because you have pulled them up, they are to suffer more?”

“Exactly, if you choose to put it so,” said Eppie.

He saw that she had determined that he should not frighten her again, or, at all events, that he should never see it if he did frighten her; and he had himself determined that his mist should never again close round her. She should not see, even if she guessed at it pretty clearly, the interpretation that he put upon the afternoon’s frictions and failures, and, on the plane of a matter-of-fact agreement as to practice, he drew her on to talk of her factory-girls, of the standards of wages, the organization of woman’s labor, so that she presently said, “What a pleasure it is to hear you talking sense, Gavan!”

“You have heard me talk a great deal of nonsense, I’m sure.”

“A great deal. Worse than Basil Mayburn’s.”

“I saw too clearly to-day the sorry figure I must have cut in your eyes. I have learned to hold my tongue. When one can only say things that sound particularly silly that is an obvious duty.”

“I am glad to hear you use the word, my dear Gavan; use it, even though it means nothing to you. Glissez mortel, n’appuyez pas should be your motto for a time; then, after some wholesome skating about on what seems the deceptive, glittering surface of things you will find, perhaps, that it isn’t an abyss the ice stretches over, but a firm meadow, the ice melted off it and no more need of skates.”

He was quite willing that she should so see his case; he was easier to live with, no doubt, on this assumption of his curability.

Eppie, still leaning back, still with folded arms, had once more closed her eyes, involuntarily sighing, as though under her own words the haunting echo of the abyss had sounded for her.

She had not yet shown him what the real trouble was, and he asked her now, in this second lull of their talk, “What else is there besides the factory-girls and Miss Grey?”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “You guess that there is something else.”

“I can see it.”

“And you are sorry?”

“Sorry, dear Eppie? Of course.”

“It’s a child, a cripple,” said Eppie. “It had been ill for a long time, but we thought that we could save it. It died this morning. I didn’t know. I didn’t get there in time. I only found out after leaving you this afternoon. And it cried for me.” She had turned her head from him as it leaned against the chair, but he saw the tears slowly rolling down her cheeks.

“I am so sorry, dear Eppie,” he said.

“The most darling child, Gavan.” His grave pity had brought him near and it gave her relief to speak. “It had such a wistful, dear little face. I used to spend hours with it; I never cared for any child so much. What I can’t bear is to think that it cried for me.” Her voice broke. Without a trace, now, of impulse or glamour, he took her hand, repeating his helpless phrase of sympathy. Yes, he thought, while she wept, here was the fatal flaw in any Tolstoian half-way house that promised peace. Love for others didn’t help their suffering; suffering with them didn’t stop it. Here was the brute fact of life that to all peace-mongers sternly said, Where there is love there is no peace.

It was only after her hand had long lain in his fraternal clasp that she drew it away, drying her tears and trying to smile her thanks at him. Looking before her into the fire, and back into a retrospect of sadness, she said: “How often you and I meet death together, Gavan. The poor monkey, and Bobbie, and Elspeth even, ought to count.”

“You must think of me and death together,” he said.

He felt in a moment that the words had for her some significance that he had not intended. In her silence was a shock, and in her voice, when she spoke, a startled thing determinedly quieted.

“Not more than you must think of me and it together.”

“You and death, dear Eppie! You are its very antithesis!”

She did not look at him, and he could not see her eyes, but he knew, with the almost uncanny intuition that he so often had in regard to her, that a rising strength, a strength that threatened something, strove with a sudden terror.

“Life conquers death,” she said at last.

He armed himself with lightness. “Of course, dear Eppie,” he said; “of course it does; always and always. The poor baby dies, and—I wonder how many other babies are being born at this moment? Conquers death? I should think it did!”

“I did not mean in that way,” she answered. She had risen, and, looking at the clock, seemed to show him that their time was over. “But we won’t discuss life and death now,” she said.

“You mean that it’s late and that I must go?” he smiled.

“Perhaps I mean only that I don’t want to discuss,” she smiled back. “Though—yes, indeed, it is late; almost seven. I have a great many things to do this evening, so that I must rest before dinner, and let you go.”

“I may come again?”

“Whenever you will. Thank you for being so kind to-day.”

“Kind, dear Eppie?”

“For being sorry, I mean.”

“Who but a brute would not have been?”

“And you are not a brute.”

The shaded light cast soft upward shadows on her face, revealing sweet oddities of expression. In their shadow he could not fathom her eyes; but a tenderness, peaceful, benignant, even a recovered gaiety, hovered on her brow, her upper lip, her cheeks. It was like a reflection of sunlight in a deep pool, this dim smiling of gratitude and gaiety.

He had a queer feeling, and a profounder one than in their former moment when she had repudiated his helpless emotion, that she spared him, that she restrained some force that might break upon this fraternal nearness. For an instant he wondered if he wanted to be spared, and with the wonder was once more the wrench at leaving her there, alone, in her fire-lit room. But it was her strength that carried them over all these dubious undercurrents, and he so relied on it that, holding her hand in good-by, he said, “I will come soon. I like it here.”

“And you are coming to Kirklands this summer. Uncle expects it. You mustn’t disappoint him, and me. I shall be there for a month.”

“I’ll come.”

“Jim Grainger will be there, too. You remember Jim. You can fight with him from morning till night, but you and I will fight about nothing, absolutely nothing, Gavan. We will—glisser. We will talk about Goya! We will be perfectly comfortable.”

He really believed that they might be, so happily convincing was her tone.

“Grainger is a great chum of yours, isn’t he?” he asked.

“You remember, he and his brother were old playmates; Clarence has turned out a poor creature; he’s a nobody in the church. I’m very fond of Jim. And I admire him tremendously. He is the conquering type, you know—the type that tries for the high grapes.”

“You won’t set him at me, to mangle me for your recreation?”

“Do I seem such a pitiless person?”

“Oh, it would be for my good, of course.”

“You may come with no fear of manglings. You sha’n’t be worried or reformed.”

They had spoken as if the captain were non-existent, but Gavan put the only qualifying touch to his assurance of seeing her at Kirklands. “I’ll come—if I can get there by then.”

XII

BUT he did not go to her again in the slums. The final phases of his father’s long illness kept him in Surrey, and he found, on thinking it over, that he was content to rest in the peace of that last seeing of her.

It was clear to him that, were it not for that paralysis of the heart and will, he would have been her lover. Like a veiled, exquisite picture, the impossible love was with him always; he could lift the veil and look upon it with calmness. That he owed something of this calmness to Eppie he well knew. She loved him,—that, too, was evident,—but as a sister might love, perhaps as a mother might. He was her child, her sick child or brother, and he smiled over the simile, well content, and with an odd sense of safety in his assurance. Peace was to be their final word, and in the long months of a still, hot summer, this soft, persistent note of peace was with him and filled a lassitude greater than any he had known.

Monotonously the days went by like darkly freighted boats on a sultry sea—low-lying boats, sliding with the current under sleepy sails.

He watched consciousness fade from his father’s body and found strange, sly analogies (they were like horrid nudges in the dark)—with his mother’s death, the worthless man, the saintly woman, mingling in the sameness of their ending, the pitifulness, after all, of the final insignificance that overtook them both. And so glassy was the current, so sleepy the wind, that the analogy shook hardly a tremor of pain through him.

In the hour of his father’s death, a more trivial memory came—trivial, yet it lent a pathos, even a dignity, to the dying man. In the captain’s eyes, turned wonderingly on him, in the automatic stretching out of his wasted hand for his,—Gavan held it to the end—was the reminiscence of the poor monkey’s far-away death, the little tropical creature that had drooped and died at Kirklands.

On the day of the funeral, Gavan sat in the library at dusk, and the lassitude had become so deep, partly through the breakdown of sheer exhaustion, that the thought of going on watching his own machinery work—toward that same end,—the end of the monkey, of his father, his mother,—was profoundly disgusting.

It was a positively physical disgust, a nausea of fatigue, that had overtaken him as he watched the rooks, above the dark yet gilded woods, wheel against a sunset sky.

Almost automatically, with no sense of choice or effort, he had unlocked a drawer of the writing-table beside him and taken out a case of pistols, merely wondering if the machine were going to take the final and only logical move of stopping itself.

He was a little interested to observe, as he opened the case, that he felt no emotion at all. He had quite expected that at such a last moment life would concentrate, gather itself for a final leap on him, a final clinging. He had expected to have a bout with the elemental, the thing that some men called faith in life and some only desire of life, and, indeed, for a moment, his mind wandered in vague, Buddhistic fancies about the wheel of life to which all desire bound one, desire, the creator of life, so that as long as the individual felt any pulse of it life might always suck him back into the vortex. The fancy gave him his one stir of uneasiness. Suppose that the act of departure were but the final act of will. Could it be that such self-affirmation might tie him still to the wheel he strove to escape, and might the drama still go on for his unwilling spirit in some other dress of flesh? To see the fear as the final bout was to quiet it; it was a fear symptomatic of life, a lure to keep him going; and, besides, how meaningless such surmises, on their ethical basis of voluntary choice, as if in the final decision one would not be, as always, the puppet of the underlying will. His mind dropped from the thread-like interlacing of teasing metaphysical conjecture to a calm as quiet and deep as though he were about to turn on his pillow and fall asleep.

Now, like the visions in a dreamy brain, the memories of the day trooped through the emptiness of thought. He was aware, while he watched the visions, of himself sitting there, to a spectator a tragic or a morbid figure. Morbid was of course the word that a frightened or merely stupid humanity would cast at him. And very morbid he was, to be sure, if life were desirable and to cease to desire it abnormal.

He saw himself no longer in either guise. He was looking now at his father’s coffin lowered into the earth of the little churchyard beside his mother’s grave; the fat, genial face of the sexton, the decorous sadness on the little rector’s features. Overhead had been the quietly stirring elms; sheep grazed beyond the churchyard wall and on the horizon was the pastoral blue of distant hills. He saw the raw, new grave and the heave of the older grave’s green sod, the old stone, with its embroidery of yellow lichen and its text of eternal faith.

And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,—all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,—struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,—this dream where such resurrections were possible.

He had lifted the pistol, pausing for a moment in an uncertainty as to whether head or heart were the surer exit, when a quiet step at the door arrested him.

“Shall I bring the lamps, sir?” asked Howson’s quiet voice.

Gavan could but admire his own deftness in tossing a newspaper over the pistol. He found himself perfectly prepared to keep up the last appearances. He said that he didn’t want the lamps yet and that Howson could leave the curtains undrawn. “It’s sultry this evening,” he added.

“It is, sir; I expect we’ll have thunder in the night,” said Howson, whose voice partook of the day’s decorous gloom. He had brought in the evening mail and laid the letters and newspapers beside Gavan, slightly pushing aside the covered pistol to make room for them, an action that Gavan observed with some intentness. But Howson saw nothing.

Left alone again, Gavan, not moving in his chair, glanced at the letters and papers neatly piled beside his elbow.

After the rending agony of that moment of hideous realization, when, in every fiber, he had felt his own woeful humanity, an odd sleepiness almost overcame him.

He felt much more like going to sleep than killing himself, and, yawning, stretching, he shivered a little from sheer fatigue.

The edge of the newspaper that covered the pistol was weighted down by the pile of papers, and in putting out his hand for it, automatically, he pushed the letters aside, then, yawning again, picked them up instead of the pistol. He glanced over the envelops, not opening them,—the last hand at cards, that could hold no trumps for him. It was with as mechanical an interest as that of the condemned criminal who, on the way to the scaffold, turns his head to look at some unfamiliar sight. But at the last letter he paused. The post-mark was Scotch; the writing was Eppie’s.

He might have considered at that moment that the shock he felt was a warning that life was by no means done with him, and that his way of safety lay in swift retreat.

But after the wrench of agony and the succeeding sliding languor, he did not consider anything. It was like a purely physical sensation, what he felt, as he held the letter and looked at Eppie’s writing. Soft, recurrent thrills went through him, as though a living, vibrating thing were in his hands. Eppie; Kirklands; the heather under a summer sky. Was it desire, or a will-less drifting with a new current that the new vision brought? He could not have told.

He opened the letter and read Eppie’s matter-of-fact yet delicate sympathy.

He must be worn out. She begged him to remember his promise and to come to them at once.

At once, thought Gavan. It must be that, indeed, or not at all. He glanced at the clock. He could really go at once. He could catch the London train, the night express for Scotland, and he could be at Kirklands at noon next day. He rose and rang the bell, looking out at the darker pink of the sky, where the rooks no longer wheeled, until Howson appeared.

“I’m going to Scotland to-night, at once.” He found himself repeating the summons of the letter. “Pack up my things. Order the trap.”

Howson showed no surprise. A flight from the house of death was only natural.

Gavan, when he was gone, went to the table and closed the box of pistols with a short, decisive snap—a decision in sharp contrast to the mist in which his mind was steeped.

The peace the pistols promised, the peace of the northern sky and the heather: why did he choose the latter? But then he did not choose. Something had chosen for him. Something had called him back. Was it that he was too weary to resist? or did all his strength consist in yielding? He could not have told. Let the play go on. Its next act would be sweet to watch. Of that he was sure.