She smiled back. “Probably. I knew, you see.”
Her assurance, with its calm over what it knew, really puzzled him.
“Well, what did you know?”
She had kept on quietly smiling while she looked at him, and, though she now became grave, it was not as if for pain but for thankfulness. “It was in the evening, the day after I wrote to you, the day your father was buried. I went to my room to dress for dinner, my room next yours, you know. And I was looking out,—at the pine-tree, the summer-house where we played, and, in especial, I remember, at the white roses that I could smell in the evening so distinctly,—when I knew, or saw, I don’t know which, that you were in great suffering. It was most of all as if I were in you, feeling it myself, rather than seeing or knowing. Then,” her voice went on in its unshaken quiet, “I did seem to see—a grave; not your father’s grave. You were seeing it, too,—a green grave. And then I came back into myself and knew. You were in some way,—going. I stood there and looked at the roses and seemed only to wait intensely, to watch intensely. And after that came a great calm, and I knew that you were not going.”
She quietly looked at him again,—her eyes had not been on him while she spoke,—and, though he had paled a little, he looked as quietly back.
He found himself accepting, almost as a matter of course, this deep, subconscious bond between them.
But in another moment, another realization came. He took her hand and raised it to his lips.
“I always make you suffer.”
“No,” she answered, though she, now, was a little pale, “I didn’t suffer. I was beyond, above all that. Whatever happened, we were really safe. That was another thing I knew.”
He relinquished the kissed hand. “Dear Eppie, dear, dear Eppie, I am glad that this happened.”