But with her gaiety she insisted: “Oh, but let us have the truth. You must think it. What else could you think?” and, again with the note of pity that would atone for the cruel lightness, “Poor Gavan! My poor, darling Gavan! And I must leave you with your thoughts—your empty thoughts, alone.”
He had taken a long breath over the physical pang her words had inflicted, and now he looked down at her hand, gently, one after the other, as though unseeingly, smoothing her fingers.
“While I go on,” she said.
“Yes, dear,” he assented.
“You humor me with that. You are so glad, for me, that I go with all my illusions about me. Aren’t you afraid that, because of them, I’ll be caught in the mill again and ground round and round in incarnations until, only after such a long time, I come out all clean and white and selfless, not a scrap of dangerous life about me—Alone with the Alone.”
He felt now the fever in her clearness, the hovering on the border of hallucination. The colors flamed indeed, and her thoughts seemed to shoot up in strange flickerings, a medley of inconsequent memories and fancies strung on their chain of unnatural lucidity.
He answered with patient gentleness, “I’m not afraid for you, Eppie. I don’t think all that.”
“Nor I for myself,” she retorted. “I love the mill and its grindings. But what you think,—I know perfectly what you think. You can’t keep it from me, Gavan. You can’t keep anything from me. And I found something that said it all. I can remember it. Shall I say it to you?”
He bowed his head, smoothing her hand, not looking up at her while, in that voice of defiance, of fever, yet of such melancholy and echoing sweetness, she repeated:
“Ne suis-je pas un faux accord
Dans la divine symphonie,
Grâce à la vorace Ironie
Qui me secoue et qui me mord?