But for all that, it was with the strangest mixture of relief and dismay that he found upon the breakfast-table next morning an urgent summons for his return home. It was the affable little rector of the parish in Surrey who wrote to tell him of his father’s sudden breakdown,—softening of the brain. When Eppie appeared, a little grave, but all clear composure, he was able to show her the letter and to tell her of his immediate departure with a composure as assured as her own, but he wondered, while he spoke, if to her also the parting would mean any form of relief. At all events, for her, it couldn’t mean any form of wrench.
Looking in swift glances at her face, while she questioned him about his father, suggested trains and nurses, and gave practical advice for his journey, he was conscious that the relief was the result of a pretty severe strain, and that though it was relieved it hadn’t stopped aching.
The very fact that Eppie’s narrow face, the hair brushed back from brow and temples, showed, in the clear morning light, more of its oddity than its beauty, made its charm cling the more closely. Her eyes looked small, her features irregular; he saw the cliff-like modeling of her temples, the cheeks, a little flat, pale, freckled; the long, queer lines of her chin. Bare, exposed, without a flicker of sunlight on her delicate analogies of ruggedness, of weather-beaten strength, she might almost have been called ugly; and, with every glance, he was feeling her as sweetness, sweetness deep and reticent, embodied.
The general and Miss Barbara were late. She poured out his coffee, saw him embarked on a sturdy breakfast, insisted, now with the irradiating smile that in a moment made her lovely, that he should eat a great deal before his journey, made him think anew of that maternal quality in her,—the tolerance, the tenderness. And in the ambiguous relief came the sharpened dismay of seeing how great was the cause for it.
He wanted to say a word, only one, about their little drama of last night, but the time didn’t really seem to come for it; perhaps she saw that it shouldn’t come. But on the old stone steps with their yellow lichen spots, his farewells over to the uncle and aunt, and he and Eppie standing out there in a momentary solitude, she said, shaking his hand, “Friends, you know. Look me up when you are next in London.” She had her one word to say, and she had said it when and how she wished. It wasn’t anything so crude as reassurance; it was rather a sunny assurance, in which she wished him to share, that none was needed.
He looked, like the boy of years ago, a real depth of gratitude into her eyes. She had given him his chance.
“I’ll never frighten you again; I’ll never displease you again.”
“I know you won’t. I won’t let you,” Eppie smiled.
“I wish I were more worth your while—worth your being kind to me.”
“You think you are still—gloomy, tiresome, self-centered?”