“Jim, dear, dear Jim, never, never,” she said. “I am his, only his, fragments, all of me, for as long as I am I.”
Grainger hid his face on the arm of her chair.
“And he is mine,” said Eppie. “He knows it, and that is why he fears me. He is mine forever.”
“I am glad for your sake that you can believe that,” Grainger muttered, “and glad, for my own, that I don’t.”
“Why, Jim?”
“I could hardly live if I thought that you were going to love him in eternity and that I was, forever, to be shut away. Thank goodness that it’s only for a lifetime that my tragedy lasts.”
She closed her eyes to these perplexities, laying her hand on his.
“I don’t know. We can only think and act for this life. It’s this we have to shape. Perhaps in eternity, really in eternity, whatever that may mean, I won’t need to shut you out. Dear, dear Jim, it’s hard that it must seem that to you now. You know what I feel about you. And who could feel it as I do? We are in the same boat.”
“No, for he, at least, loves no one else. You haven’t that to bear. As far as he goes,—and it isn’t far,—he is yours. We are not at all in the same boat. But that’s enough of me. I suppose I am done for, as you say, forever.”
He had got upon his feet, and, as if at their mutual wreckage, looked down with a face that had found again its old shield of grimness.