“Eppie! My dear!” cried Mrs. Arley, when father and son had disappeared. “How unutterably hateful. I am more sorry for him than for you, Eppie. His face!”
Eppie was shrugging up her shoulders and straightening herself as though the captain’s grasp still threatened her.
“Hateful indeed; but trivial. Gavan understands that I understand. We must make him feel that it’s nothing.”
“He’s quite mad, horrible old man.”
“Not quite; more uncomfortably muddled than mad. We must make him see that we think nothing of it,” Eppie repeated. She turned to Gavan, who entered as she spoke, still with his sick flush and showing a speechless inability to frame apologies.
“This is what it is to have echoes, Gavan,” she said. “My little misfortunes have reached your father’s ears.” She went to him, she took his hand, she smiled at him, all her radiance recovered, a garment of warmth and ease to cover the shivering the captain’s words might have made. “Please don’t mind. I wasn’t a bit bothered, really.”
He could almost have wept for the relief of her smile, her sanity. The linking of their names in such an unthinkable connection had given him the nausea qualm of a terrifying obsession. He could find now only trite words in which to tell her that she was very kind and that he was more sorry than he could say.
“But you mustn’t be. It was such an obvious muddle for a twisted mind. He knew,” said Eppie, still smiling with the healing radiance, “that I had been jilted, and he knew that I was very fond of you, and he put together the one and one make two that happened to be before him.” She saw that his distress had been far greater than her own, that she now gave him relief.
Afterward, as she and Mrs. Arley sped away, her own reaction from the healing attitude showed in a rather grim silence. She leaned back in the swift, keen air, her arms folded in the fullness of her capes.
But Mrs. Arley could not repress her own accumulations of feeling. “My dear Eppie,” she said, her hand on her shoulder, and with an almost more than maternal lack of reticence, “I want you to marry him. Don’t glare Medusa at me. I hate tact and silences. Heaven knows I would have scouted the idea of such a match for you before seeing him to-day. But my hard old heart is touched. He is such a dear; so lonely. It’s a nice little place, too, and there is some money. Jim Grainger is too drab-colored a person for you,—all his force, all his sheckles, can’t gild him,—and Kenneth Langley is penniless. This dear creature is not a bit drab and not quite penniless. And you are big enough to marry a man who needs you rather than one you need. Will you think of it, Eppie?”