“Why a brute, Gavan?”
“Making you suffer—more. I’m always making you suffer, Eppie, always; and you are really such a happy person. Come, let us go out for a walk. Let us go out on the moor. It will be delicious in the heather now. I want to see it and smell it. It will do us good.”
She resented his wisdom. “But you won’t forget Robbie, while we walk.”
For a moment, as if in great weariness, Gavan leaned his head against her shoulder. “Don’t talk of Robbie, please. We must forget him—just now, or try to, or else we can’t go on at all.”
Still she persisted, for she could not let it go like that: “I can think of him and go on too. I don’t want to run away from Robbie because he makes me unhappy.”
Gavan sighed, raising his head. “You are stronger than I am, Eppie. I must—I must run away.” He took her hand and drew her to the door, and she followed him, though glancing back, as she went, at the little form under the shroud.
VI
OBBIE’S death overshadowed the last days of Gavan’s stay. Eppie did not feel, after it, after his avowed and helpless breakdown, the barrier sense so strongly. He didn’t attempt to hide dejection; but that was probably because she too was dejected and there was no necessity for keeping up appearances that would only jar and hurt. Eppie gave herself whole-heartedly to her griefs, and this was her grief as well as his. He could share it. It was no longer the holding her at arm’s length from a private woe. Yet the grief was not really shared, Eppie knew, for it was not the same grief that they felt. Of the difference they did not speak again. Then there came the sadness of the parting, so near now and for the first time realized in all its aspects.
Eppie gathered, from chance remarks of the general’s, that this parting was to be indefinite. The summer at Kirklands was no precedent for future summers, as she and Gavan had quite taken for granted. An uncle of Gavan’s, his father’s eldest brother, was to give him his home in England. This uncle had been traveling in the East this summer, and Gavan did not formally come under his jurisdiction until autumn. But the general conjectured that the jurisdiction would be well defined and tolerably stringent. Sir James Palairet had clearly cut projects for Gavan; they would, perhaps, not include holidays at Kirklands. The realization was, for Gavan, too, a new one.