“Oh, Eppie, what can I say to you?” he murmured.
“You can say nothing. But you will have to wake. It will have to come,—the sorrow, the joy of reality,—God—and me.”
It was his face, with closed eyes, with its stricken, ashen agony, that seemed the dying face. Hers, turned gently toward him, had all the beneficence, the radiance of life. But when she spoke again there was in her voice a tranced stillness as though already it spoke from another world.
“You love me, Gavan.”
“I love you. You have that. That is yours, forever. I long for you, always, always,—even when I think that I am at peace. You are in everything: I hear a bird, and I think of your voice; I see a flower, or the sky, and it’s of your face I think. I am yours, Eppie—yours forever.”
“You make me happy,” she said.
“Eppie, my darling Eppie, die now, die in my arms, dearest—in your happiness.”
“No, not yet; I can’t go yet—though I wish it, too,” she said. “There are still horrid bits—dreadful dark places—like the dreadful poem—the poem of you, Gavan—where I lose myself; burning places, edges of pain, where I fight to find myself again; long, dim places where I dream—dream—. I won’t have you see me like that; you might think that you watched the scattering of the real me. I won’t have you remember me all dim and broken.”
Her voice was sinking from her into an abyss of languor, and she felt the swirl of phantom thoughts blurring her mind even while she spoke.
As on that far-away night when he held her hand and they stood together under the stars, she said, speaking now her prayer, “O God! God!”; and seeming in the effort of her will to lift a weight that softly, inexorably, like the lid of a tomb, pressed down upon her, “I am here,” she said. “You are mine. I will not be afraid. Remember me. So good-by, Gavan.”