“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
UT 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.