“I am afraid of you, then.”
“Of course you are afraid of me.”
Still he smiled. “I am afraid for you.”
“Of course you are. You have your moments of humanity.”
“I have. And so I shall go to-morrow,” said Gavan.
She looked at him in silence, her face taking on its haggard, unbeautiful aspect of strange, rocky endurance. And never had his mind been more alert, more mocking, more aloof from any entanglement of feeling than while he saw her love and his; saw her sorrow and his sorrow—his strange, strange sorrow that, like a sick, helpless child, longed, in its darkness, its loneliness, to hide its head on her breast and to feel her arms go round it. Love and sorrow were far, far away—so far that it was as if they had no part at all in himself, as if it were not he that felt them.
“Are you so afraid as that?” Eppie asked.
“After last night?” he answered. “After what I felt when I saw you here, with him? After this? Of course I am as afraid as that. I must flee—for your life, Eppie. I am its shadow—its fatal shadow.”
“No, I am yours. Life is the shadow to you.”
“Well, on both sides, then, we must be afraid,” he assented.