The Shadow of Life

[PART I]
[I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI.]
[PART II]
[I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X, ] [XI, ] [XII.]
[PART III]
[I, ] [II, ] [III, ] [IV, ] [V, ] [VI, ] [VII, ] [VIII, ] [IX, ] [X.]

The Shadow of Life

BY
Anne Douglas Sedgwick
AUTHOR OF “THE RESCUE,” “THE CONFOUNDING OF
CAMELIA,” “PATHS OF JUDGEMENT,” ETC.

NEW YORK
The Century Co.
1906

Copyright, 1906, by
The Century Co.
———
Published February, 1906
THE DE VINNE PRESS

THE SHADOW OF LIFE

PART I

THE SHADOW OF LIFE

I

LSPETH GIFFORD was five years old when she went to live at Kirklands. Her father, an army officer, died in her babyhood, and her mother a few years later. The uncle and aunts in Scotland, all three much her mother’s seniors, were the child’s nearest relatives.

To such a little girl death had meant no more than a bewildered loneliness, but the bewilderment was so sharp, the loneliness so aching, that she cried herself into an illness. She had seen her dead mother, the sweet, sightless, silent face, familiar yet amazing, and more than any fear or shrinking had been the suffocating mystery of feeling herself forgotten and left behind. Her uncle Nigel, sorrowful and grave, but so large and kind that his presence seemed to radiate a restoring warmth, came to London for her and a fond nurse went with her to the North, and after a few weeks the anxious affection of her aunts Rachel and Barbara built about her, again, a child’s safe universe of love.

Kirklands was a large white house and stood on a slope facing south, backed by a rise of thickly wooded hill and overlooking a sea of heathery moorland. It was a solitary but not a melancholy house. Lichens yellowed the high-pitched slate roof and creepers clung to the roughly “harled” walls. On sunny days the long rows of windows were golden squares in the illumined white, and, under a desolate winter sky, glowed with an inner radiance.

In the tall limes to the west a vast colony of rooks made their nests; and to Eppie these high nests, so dark against the sky in the vaguely green boughs of spring or in the autumn’s bare, swaying branches, had a weird, fairy-tale charm. They belonged neither to the earth nor to the sky, but seemed to float between, in a place of inaccessible romance, and the clamor, joyous yet irritable, at dawn and evening seemed full of quaint, strange secrets that only a wandering prince or princess would have understood.

Before the house a round of vivid green was encircled by the drive that led through high stone gates to the moorland road. A stone wall, running from gate to gate, divided the lawn from the road, and upon each pillar a curiously carved old griffin, its back and head spotted with yellow lichens, held stiffly up, for the inspection of passers-by, the family escutcheon. From the windows at the back of the house one looked up at the hilltop, bare but for a group of pine-trees, and down into a deep garden. Here, among utilitarian squares of vegetable beds, went overgrown borders of flowers—bands of larkspurs, lupins, stocks, and columbines. The golden-gray of the walls was thickly embroidered with climbing fruit-trees, and was entirely covered, at one end of the garden, by a small snow-white rose, old-fashioned, closely petaled; and here in a corner stood a thatched summer-house, where Eppie played with her dolls, and where, on warm summer days, the white roses filled the air with a fragrance heavy yet fresh in its wine-like sweetness. All Eppie’s early memories of Kirklands centered about the summer-house and were mingled with the fragrance of the roses. Old James, the gardener, put up there a little locker where her toys were stored, and shelves where she ranged her dolls’ dishes. There were rustic seats, too, and a table—a table always rather unsteady on the uneven wooden floor. The sun basked in that sheltered, windless corner, and, when it rained, the low, projecting eaves ranged one safely about with a silvery fringe of drops through which one looked out over the wet garden and up at the white walls of the house, crossed by the boughs of a great, dark pine-tree.

Inside the house the chief room was the fine old library, where, from long windows, one looked south over the purples and blues of the moorland. Books filled the shelves from floor to ceiling—old-fashioned tomes in leather bindings, shut away, many of them, behind brass gratings and with all the delightful sense of peril connected with the lofty upper ranges, only to be reached by a courageous use of the library steps.

Here Uncle Nigel gave Eppie lessons in Greek and history every morning, aided in the minor matters of her education by a submissive nursery governess, an Englishwoman, High Church in doctrine and plaintive in a country of dissent.

A door among the book-shelves led from the library into the morning-room or boudoir, where Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara sewed, read, dispensed small charities and lengthy advice to the village poor—a cheerful little room in spite of its northern aspect and the shadowing trunk of the great pine-tree just outside its windows. It was all faded chintzes, gilt carvings, porcelain ornaments in corner cabinets; its paper was white with a fine gilt line upon it; and even though to Eppie it had sad associations with Bible lessons and Sunday morning collects, it retained always its aspect of incongruous and delightful gaiety—almost of frivolity. Sitting there in their delicate caps and neatly appointed dresses, with their mild eyes and smoothly banded hair, Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara gathered a picture-book charm—seemed to count less as personalities and more as ornaments. On the other side of the hall, rather bare and bleak in its antlered spaciousness, were the dining-and smoking-rooms, the first paneled in slightly carved wood, painted white, the last a thoroughly modern room, redolent of shabby comforts, with deep leather chairs, massive mid-century furniture, and an aggressively cheerful paper.

The drawing-room, above the library, was never used—a long, vacant room, into which Eppie would wander with a pleasant sense of trespassing and impertinence; a trivial room, for all the dignity of its shrouded shapes and huge, draped chandelier. Its silver-flecked gray paper and oval gilt picture-frames recalled an epoch nearer and uglier than that of the grave library and sprightly boudoir below, though even its ugliness had a charm. Eppie was fond of playing by herself there, and hid sundry secrets under the Chinese cabinet, a large, scowling piece of furniture, its black lacquered panels inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Once it was a quaintly cut cake, neatly sealed in a small jeweler’s box, that she thrust far away under it; and once a minute china doll, offspring of a Christmas cracker and too minute for personality, was swaddled mummy fashion in a ribbon and placed beside the box. Much excitement was to be had by not looking to see if the secrets were still there and in hastily removing them when a cleaning threatened.

The day-nursery, afterward the school-room, was over the dining-room, and the bedrooms were at the back of the house.

The Carmichaels were of an ancient and impoverished family, their estates, shrunken as they were, only kept together by careful economy, but there was no touch of dreariness in Eppie’s home. She was a happy child, filling her life with imaginative pastimes and finding on every side objects for her vigorous affections. Her aunts’ mild disciplines weighed lightly on her. Love and discipline were sundered principles in the grandmotherly administration, and Eppie soon learned that the formalities of the first were easily evaded and to weigh the force of her own naughtiness against it. Corporal punishment formed part of the Misses Carmichael’s conception of discipline, but though, on the rare occasions when it could not be escaped, Eppie bawled heart-rendingly during the very tremulous application, it was with little disturbance of spirit that she endured the reward of transgression.

At an early age she understood very clearly the simple characters around her. Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara were both placid, both pious, both full of unsophisticated good works, both serenely acquiescent in their lots. In Aunt Barbara, indeed, placidity was touched with wistfulness; she was the gentler, the more yielding of the two. Aunt Rachel could be inspired with the greater ruthlessness of conscientious conviction. It was she who insisted upon the letter of the law in regard to the Sunday collect, the Sunday church-going, who mingled reproof with her village charities, who could criticize with such decision the short-comings, doctrinal and domestic, of Mr. MacNab, minister of the little established church that stood near the village. Aunt Barbara was far less assured of the forms of things; she seemed to search and fumble a little for further, fuller outlets, and yet to have found a greater serenity. Aunt Rachel was fond of pointing out to her niece such facts of geology, botany, and natural history in general as the country life and her own somewhat rudimentary knowledge suggested to her as useful; Aunt Barbara, on the contrary, told pretty, allegorical tales about birds and flowers—tales with a heavy cargo of moral insinuation, to which, it must be confessed, Eppie listened with an inner sense of stubborn realism. It was Aunt Barbara who sought to impress upon her that the inclusive attribute of Deity was love, and who, when Eppie asked her where God was, answered, “In your heart, dear child.” Eppie was much puzzled by anatomical considerations in reflecting upon this information. Aunt Rachel, with clear-cut, objective facts from Genesis, was less mystifying to inquisitive, but pagan childhood. Eppie could not help thinking of God as somewhat like austere, gray-bearded old James, the gardener, whose vocation suggested that pictorial chapter in the Bible, and who, when he found her one day eating unripe fruit, warned her with such severity of painful retribution.

The aunts spent year after year at Kirklands, with an infrequent trip to Edinburgh. Neither had been South since the death of the beloved younger sister. Uncle Nigel, the general, older than either, was russet-faced, white-haired, robust. He embodied a sound, well-nurtured type and brought to it hardly an individual variation. He taught his niece, re-read a few old books, followed current thought in the “Quarterly” and the “Scotsman,” and wrote his memoirs, that moved with difficulty from boyhood, so detailed were his recollections and so painstaking his recording of inessential fact.

For their few neighbors, life went on as slowly as for the Carmichaels. The Carstons of Carlowrie House were in touch with a larger outside life: Sir Alec Carston was member for the county; but the inmates of Brechin House, Crail Hill, and Newton Lowry were fixtures. These dim personages hardly counted at all in young Eppie’s experience. She saw them gathered round the tea-table in the library when she was summoned to appear with tidy hair and fresh frock: stout, ruddy ladies in driving-gloves and boat-shaped hats; dry, thin young ladies in hard-looking muslins and with frizzed fringes; a solid laird or two. They were vague images in her world.

People who really counted were the village people, and on the basis of her aunts’ charitable relationship Eppie built up for herself with most of them a tyrannous friendship. The village was over two miles away; one reached it by the main road that ran along the moor, past the birch-woods, the tiny loch, and then down a steep bit of hill to the handful of huddled gray roofs. There was the post-office, the sweet-shop with its dim, small panes, behind which, to Eppie’s imagination, the bull’s-eyes and toffee and Edinburgh rock looked, in their jars, like odd fish in an aquarium; there was the carpenter’s shop, the floor all heaped with scented shavings, through which one’s feet shuffled in delightful, dry rustlings; there the public-house, a lurid corner building, past which Miss Grimsby always hurried her over-interested young charge, and there the little inn where one ordered the dusty, lurching, capacious old fly that conveyed one to the station, five miles away. Eppie was far more in the village than her share of her aunts’ charities at all justified, and was often brought in disgrace from sheer truancy. The village babies, her dolls, and Robbie, her Aberdeen terrier, were the realities at once serious and radiant of life. She could do for them, love them as she would. Her uncle and aunts and the fond old nurse were included in an unquestioning tenderness, but they could not be brought under its laws, and their independence made them more remote.

Remote, too, though by no means independent, and calling forth little tenderness, were her cousins, who spent part of their holidays each summer at Kirklands. They were English boys, coming from an English school, and Eppie was very stanchly Scotch. The Graingers, Jim and Clarence, were glad young animals. They brought from a home of small means and overflowing sisters uncouth though not bad manners and an assured tradition of facile bullying. The small Scotch cousin was at first seen only in the light of a convenience. She was to be ignored, save for her few and rudimentary uses. But Eppie, at eight years old, when the Graingers first came, had an opposed and firmly established tradition. In her own domain, she was absolute ruler, and not for a moment did her conception of her supremacy waver. Her assurance was so complete that it left no room for painful struggle or dispute. From helpless stupor to a submission as helpless, the cousins fell by degrees to a not unhappy dependence. Eppie ran, climbed, played, as good a boy as either; and it was she who organized games, she who invented wonderful new adventures, all illumined by thrilling recitatives while in progress, she who, though their ally, and a friendly one, was the brains of the alliance, and, as thinker, dominated. Brains, at their age, being rudimentary in the young male, Eppie had some ground for her consciousness of kindly disdain. She regarded Jim and Clarence as an animated form of toy, more amusing than other toys because of possibilities of unruliness, or as a mere audience, significant only as a means for adding to the zest of life. Clarence, the younger, even from the first dumb days of reconstruction, was the more malleable. He was formed for the part of dazzled subjection to a strong and splendid despotism. Eppie treated her subject races to plenty of pomp and glory. Clarence listened, tranced, to her heroic stories, followed her leadership with docile, eager fidelity, and finally, showing symptoms of extreme romanticism, declared himself forever in love with her. Eppie, like the ascendant race again, made prompt and shameless use of the avowed and very apparent weakness. She bartered rare and difficult favors for acts of service, and on one occasion—a patch of purple in young Clarence’s maudlin days—submitted, with a stony grimace, to being kissed; for this treasure Clarence paid by stealing down to the forbidden public-house and there buying a bottle of beer which Eppie and Jim were to consume as robbers in a cave,—Clarence the seized and despoiled traveler. Eppie was made rather ill by her share of the beer, but, standing in a bed-gown at her window, she called to her cousins, in the garden below, such cheerful accounts of her malady, the slight chastisement that Aunt Rachel had inflicted, and her deft evasion of medicines, that her luster was heightened rather than dimmed by the disaster. Jim never owned, for a moment, to there being any luster. He was a square-faced boy, with abrupt nose, and lips funnily turning up at the corners, yet funnily grim,—most unsmiling of lips. He followed Eppie’s lead with the half-surly look of a slave in bondage, and seemed dumbly to recognize that his own unfitness rather than Eppie’s right gave her authority. He retaliated on Clarence for his sense of subjection and cruelly teased and scoffed at him. Clarence, when pushed too far, would appeal to Eppie for protection, and on these occasions, even while she sheltered him, a strange understanding seemed to pass between her and the tormentor as though, with him, she found Clarence ludicrous. Jim, before her stinging reproofs, would stand tongue-tied and furious, but, while she stung him, Eppie liked the sullen culprit better than the suppliant victim.

II

HEN Eppie was ten years old, she heard one day that a boy, a new boy, was coming to spend the spring and summer—a boy from India, Gavan Palairet. His mother and her own had been dear friends, and his father, as hers had been, was in the army; and these points of contact mitigated for Eppie the sense of exotic strangeness.

Eppie gathered that a cloud rested upon Mrs. Palairet, and the boy, though exotic, seemed to come from the far, brilliant country with his mother’s cloud about him.

“Ah, poor Fanny!” the general sighed over the letter he read at the breakfast-table. “How did she come to marry that brute! It will be a heart-breaking thing for her to send the boy from her.”

Eppie, listening with keen interest, gathered further, from the reminiscent talk that went on between the sisters and brother, that Mrs. Palairet, for some years of her boy’s babyhood, lived in England; then it had been India and the effort to keep him near her in the hills, and now his delicacy and the definite necessity of schooling had braced her to the parting. The general said, glancing with fond pride at his niece, that Eppie would be a fine playmate for him and would be of great service in cheering him before his plunge into school. Fanny had begged for much gentleness and affection for him. Apparently the boy was as heartbroken as she.

Eppie had very little diffidence about her own powers as either playmate or cheerer: she was well accustomed to both parts; but her eagerness to sustain and amuse the invalid was touched with a little shyness. The sad boy from India—her heart and mind rushed out in a hundred plans of welcome and consolation; but she suspected that a sad boy from India would require subtler methods than those sufficing for a Jim or a Clarence. From the first moment of hearing about him she had felt, as if instinctively, that he would not be at all like Jim and Clarence.

He came on a still, sunny spring day. The general went to meet him at the station, and while he was gone Eppie made excitement endurable by vigorous action. Again and again she visited the fresh little room overlooking the hills, the garden, the pine-tree boughs, standing in a thoughtful surveyal of its beauties and comforts or darting off to add to them. She herself chose the delightful piece of green soap from the store-cupboard and the books for the table; and she gathered the daffodils in the birch-woods, filling every vase with them, so that the little room with its white walls and hangings of white dimity seemed lighted by clusters of pale, bright flames.

When the old fly rumbled at last through the gates and around the drive, Miss Rachel and Miss Barbara were in the doorway, and Eppie stood before them on the broad stone step, Robbie beside her.

Eppie was a lithe, sturdy, broad-shouldered child, with russet, sun-streaked hair, dark yet radiant, falling to her waist. She had a pale, freckled face and the woodland eyes of a gay, deep-hearted dog. To-day she wore a straight white frock, and her hair, her frock, dazzled with sunlight. No more invigorating figure could have greeted a jaded traveler.

That it was a very jaded traveler she saw at once, while the general bundled out of the fly and handed rugs, dressing-cases, and cages to the maid, making a passage for Gavan’s descent. The boy followed him, casting anxious glances at the cages, and Eppie’s eyes, following his, saw tropical birds in one and in the other a quaint, pathetic little beast—a lemur-like monkey swaddled in flannel and motionless with fear. Its quick, shining eyes met hers for a moment, and she looked away from them with a sense of pity and repulsion.

Gavan, as he ascended the steps, looked at once weary, frightened, and composed. He had a white, thin face and thick black hair—the sort of face and hair, Eppie thought, that the wandering prince of one of her own stories, the prince who understood the rooks’ secrets, would have. He was dressed in a long gray traveling-cloak with capes. The eager welcome she had in readiness for him seemed out of place before his gentle air of self-possession, going as it did with the look of almost painful shrinking. She was a little at a loss and so were the aunts, as she saw. They took his hand in turn, they smiled, they murmured vague words of kindness; but they did not venture to kiss him. He did not seem as little a boy as they had expected. The same expression of restraint was on Uncle Nigel’s hearty countenance. The sad boy was frozen and he chilled others.

He was among them now, in the hall, his cages and rugs and boxes about him, and, with all the cheery bustling to and fro, he must feel himself dreadfully alone. Eppie, too, was chilled and knew, indeed, the childish, panic impulse to run away, but her imagination of his loneliness was so strong as to nerve quite another impulse. Once she saw him as so desolate she could not hesitate. With resolute gravity she took his hand, saying, “I am so glad that you have come, Gavan,” and, as resolutely and as gravely, she kissed him on the cheek. He flushed so deeply that for a moment all her panic came back with the fear that she had wounded his pride; but in a moment he said, glancing at her, “You are very kind. I am glad to be here, too.”

His pride was not at all wounded. Eppie felt that at all events the worst of the ice was broken.

“May I feed your animals for you while you rest?” she asked him, as, with Aunt Barbara, they went up-stairs to his room. Gavan carried the lemur himself. Eppie had the birds in their cage.

“Thanks, so much. It only takes a moment; I can do it. My monkey would be afraid of any one else,” he answered, adding, “The journey has been too much for him; he has been very strange all day.”

“He will soon get well here,” said Eppie, encouragingly—“this is such a healthy place. But Scotland will be a great change from India for him, won’t it?”

“Very great. I am afraid he is going to be ill.” And again Gavan’s eye turned its look of weary anxiety upon the lemur.

But his anxiety did not make him forget his courtesy. “What a beautiful view,” he said, when they reached his room, “and what beautiful flowers!”

“I have this view, too,” said Eppie. “The school-room has the view of the moor; but I like this best, for early morning when one gets up. You will see how lovely it is to smell the pine-tree when it is all wet with dew.”

Gavan agreed that it must be lovely, and looked out with her at the blue-green boughs; but even while he looked and admired, she felt more courtesy than interest.

They left him in his room to rest till tea-time, and in the library Aunt Rachel and Aunt Barbara exclaimed over his air of fragility.

“He is fearfully tired, poor little fellow,” said the general; “a day or two of rest will set him up.”

“He looks a very intelligent boy, Nigel,” said Miss Rachel, “but not a cheerful disposition.”

“How could one expect that from him now, poor, dear child!” Aunt Barbara expostulated. “He has a beautiful nature, I am sure—such a sensitive mouth and such fine eyes.”

And the general said: “He is wonderfully like his mother. I am glad to see that he takes after Claude Palairet in nothing.”

Eppie asked if Captain Palairet were very horrid and was told that he was, with the warning that no intimation of such knowledge on her part was to be given to her new playmate; a warning that Eppie received with some indignation. No one, she was sure, could feel for Gavan as she did, or know so well what to say and what not to say to him.

She was gratified to hear that he was not to go down to dinner but was to share the school-room high-tea with her and Miss Grimsby. But in the wide school-room, ruddy with the hues of sunset and hung with its maps and its childish decorations of Caldecott drawings and colored Christmas supplements from the “Graphic,”—little girls on stairs with dogs, and “Cherry Ripe,”—he was almost oppressively out of place. Not that he seemed to find himself so. He made, evidently, no claims to maturity. But Eppie felt a strange sense of shrunken importance as she listened to him politely answering Miss Grimsby’s questions about his voyage and giving her all sorts of information about religious sects in India. She saw herself relegated to a humbler rôle than any she had conceived possible for herself. She would be lucky if she succeeded in cheering at all this remote person; it was doubtful if she could ever come near enough to console. She took this first blow to her self-assurance very wholesomely. Her interest in the sad boy was all the keener for it. She led him, next morning, about the garden, over a bit of the moor, and into the fairyland of the birch-woods—their young green all tremulous in the wind and sunlight. And she showed him, among the pines and heather, the winding path, its white, sandy soil laced with black tree-roots, that led to the hilltop. “When you are quite rested, we will go up there, if you like,” she said. “The burn runs beside this path almost all the way—you can’t think how pretty it is; and when you get to the top you can see for miles and miles all about, all over the moors, and the hills, away beyond there, and you can see two villages besides ours, and such a beautiful windmill.”

Gavan, hardly noticing the kind little girl, except to know that she was kind, assented to all her projects, indifferent to them and to her.

A day or two after his arrival, he and Eppie were united in ministering to the dying lemur. The sad creature lay curled up in its basket, motionless, refusing food, only from time to time stretching out a languid little hand to its master; and when Gavan took it, the delicate animal miniature lay inert in his. Its eyes, seeming to grow larger and brighter as life went, had a strange look of question and wonder.

Eppie wept loudly when it was dead; but Gavan had no tears. She suspected him of a suffering all the keener and that his self-control did not allow him the relief of emotion before her. She hoped, at least, to be near him in the formalities of grief, and proposed that they should bury the lemur together, suggesting a spot among birch-trees and heather where some rabbits of her own were interred. When she spoke of the ceremony, Gavan hesitated; to repulse her, or to have her with him in the task of burial, were perhaps equally painful to him. “If you don’t mind, I think I would rather do it by myself,” he said in his gentle, tentative way.

Eppie felt her lack of delicacy unconsciously rebuked. She recognized that, in spite of her most genuine grief, the burial of the lemur had held out to her some of the satisfactory possibilities of a solemn game. She had been gross in imagining that Gavan could share in such divided instincts. Her tears fell for her own just abasement, as well as for the lemur, while she watched Gavan walking away into the woods—evidently avoiding the proximity of the rabbits—with the small white box under his arm.

The day after this was Sunday, a day of doom to Eppie. It meant that morning recitation of hymn and collect in the chintz and gilt boudoir and then the bleak and barren hours in church. Even Aunt Barbara’s mildness could, on this subject, become inflexible, and Aunt Rachel’s aspect reminded Eppie of the stern angel with the flaming sword driving frail, reluctant humanity into the stony wilderness. A flaming sword was needed. Every Sunday saw the renewal of her protest, and there were occasions on which her submission was only extorted after disgraceful scenes. Eppie herself, on looking back, had to own that she had indeed disgraced herself when she had taken refuge under her bed and lain there, her hat all bent, her fresh dress all crumpled, fiercely shrieking her refusal; and disgrace had been deeper on another day when she had actually struck out at her aunts while they mutely and in pale indignation haled her toward the door. It was dreadful to remember that Aunt Barbara had burst into tears. Eppie could not forgive herself for that. She had a stoic satisfaction in the memory of the smart whipping that she had borne without a whimper, and perhaps did not altogether repent the heavier slap she had dealt Aunt Rachel; but the thought of Aunt Barbara’s tears—they had continued so piteously to flow while Aunt Rachel whipped her—quelled physical revolt forever. She was older now, too, and protest only took the form of dejection and a hostile gloom.

On this Sunday the gloom was shot with a new and, it seemed, a most legitimate hope. Boys were usually irreligious; the Grainger cousins certainly were so: they had once run away on Sunday morning. She could not, to be sure, build much upon possible analogies of behavior between Gavan and the Graingers; yet the facts of his age and sex were there: normal, youthful manliness might be relied upon. If Gavan wished to remain it seemed perfectly probable that the elders might yield as a matter of course, and as if to a grown-up guest. Gavan was hardly treated as a child by any of them.

“You are fond of going to church, I hope, Gavan,” Aunt Rachel said at breakfast. The question had its reproof for Eppie, who, with large eyes, over her porridge, listened for the reply.

“Yes, very,” was the doom that fell.

Eppie flushed so deeply that Gavan noticed it. “I don’t mind a bit not going if Eppie doesn’t go and would like to have me stay at home with her,” he hastened, with an almost uncanny intuition of her disappointment, to add.

Aunt Rachel cast an eye of comprehension upon Eppie’s discomfited visage. “That would be a most inappropriate generosity, my dear Gavan. Eppie comes with us always.”

Gavan still looked at Eppie, who, with downcast eyes, ate swiftly.

“Now I’ll be bound that she has been wheedling you to get her off, Gavan,” said the general, with genial banter. “She is a little rebel to the bone. She knows that it’s no good to rebel, so she put you up to pleading for her”; and, as Gavan protested, “Indeed, indeed, sir, she didn’t,” he still continued, “Oh, Eppie, you baggage, you! Isn’t that it, eh? Didn’t you hope that you could stay with him if he stayed behind?”

“Yes, I did,” Eppie said, without contrition.

“She didn’t tell me so,” said Gavan, full of evident sympathy for Eppie’s wounds under this false accusation.

She repelled his defense with a curt, “I would have, if it would have done any good.”

“Ah, that’s my brave lassie,” laughed the general; but Aunt Rachel ended the unseemly exposure with a decisive, “Be still now, Eppie; we know too well what you feel about this subject. There is nothing brave in such naughtiness.”

Gavan said no more; from Eppie’s unmoved expression he guessed that such reproofs did not cut deep. He joined her after breakfast as she stood in the open doorway, looking out at the squandered glories of the day.

“Do you dislike going to church so much?” he asked her. The friendly bond of his sympathy at the table would have cheered her heart at another time; it could do no more for her now than make frankness easy and a relief.

“I hate it,” she answered.

“But why?”

“It’s so long—so stupid.”

Gavan loitered about before her on the door-step, his hands in his pockets. Evidently he could find no ready comment for her accusation.

“Every one looks so silly and so sleepy,” she went on. “Mr. MacNab is so ugly. Besides, he is an unkind man: he whips his children all the time; not whippings when they deserve it—like mine,”—Gavan looked at her, startled by this impersonally just remark,—“he whips them because he is cross himself. Why should he tell us about being good if he is as ill-tempered as possible? And he has a horrid voice,—not like the village people, who talk in a dear, funny way,—he has a horrid, pretend voice. And you stand up and sit down and have nothing to do for ages and ages. I don’t see how anybody can like church.”

Gavan kicked vaguely at the lichen spots.

“Do you really like it?”

“Yes,” he answered, with his shy abruptness.

“But why? It’s different, I know, for old people—I don’t suppose that they mind things any longer; but I don’t see how a boy, a young boy”—and Eppie allowed herself a reproachful emphasis—“can possibly like it.”

“I’m used to it, you see, and I don’t think of it in your way at all.” Gavan could not speak to this funny child of its sacred associations. In church he had always felt that he and his mother had escaped to a place of reality and peace. He entered, through his love for her, into the love of the sense of sanctuary from an ominous and hostile world. And he was a boy with a deep, sad sense of God.

“But you don’t like it,” said the insistent Eppie.

“I more than like it.”

She eyed him gravely. “I suppose it is because you are so grown up. Yet you are only four years older than I am. I wonder if I will ever get to like it. I hope not.”

“Well, it will be more comfortable for you if you do,—since you have to go,” said Gavan, with his faint, wintry smile.

She felt the kindness of his austere banter, and retorting, “I’d rather not be comfortable, then,” joined him in the sunlight on the broad, stone step, going on with quite a sense of companionship: “Only one thing I don’t so much mind—and that is the hymns. I am so glad when they come that I almost shout them. Sometimes—I’m telling you as quite a secret, you know—I shout as loud as I possibly can on purpose to disturb Aunt Rachel. I know it’s wrong, so don’t bother to tell me so; besides, it’s partly because I really like to shout. But I always do hope that some day they may leave me at home rather than have me making such a noise. People often turn round to look.”

Gavan laughed.

“You think that wicked no doubt?”

“No, I think it funny, and quite useless, I’m sure.”

After all, Gavan wasn’t a muff, as a boy fond of church might have been suspected of being.

Yet after the walk through the birch-woods and over a corner of moor to the bare little common where the church stood, and when they were all installed in the hard, familiar pew, a new and still more alienating impression came to her—alienating yet fascinating. A sense of awe crept over her and she watched Gavan in an absorbed, a dreamy wonder.

Eppie only associated prayers with a bedside; they were part of the toilet, so to speak—went in with the routine of hair-and tooth-brushing and having one’s bath. To pray in church, if one were a young person, seemed a mystifying, almost an abnormal oddity. She was accustomed to seeing in the sodden faces of the village children an echo to her own wholesome vacuity. But Gavan really prayed; that was evident. He buried his face in his arms. He thought of no one near him.

It was Eppie’s custom to vary the long monotony of Mr. MacNab’s dreary, nasal, burring voice by sundry surreptitious occupations, such as drawing imaginary pictures with her forefinger upon the lap of her frock, picking out in the Bible all the words of which her aunts said she could only know the meaning when she grew up, counting the number of times that Mr. MacNab stiffly raised his hand in speaking, seeing how often she could softly kick the pew in front of her before being told to stop; and then there was the favorite experiment suggested to her by the advertisement of a soap where, after fixing the eyes upon a red spot while one counted thirty, one found, on looking at a blank white space, that the spot appeared transformed, ghost-like and floating, to a vivid green. Eppie’s fertile imagination had seen in Mr. MacNab’s thin, red face a substitute for the spot, and most diverting results had followed when, after a fixed stare at his countenance, one transferred him, as it were, to the pages of one’s prayer-book. To see Mr. MacNab dimly hovering there, a green emanation, made him less intolerable in reality: found, at least, a use for him. This discovery had been confided to the Graingers, and they had been grateful for it. And when all else failed and even Mr. MacNab’s poor uses had palled, there was one bright moment to look forward to in the morning’s suffocating tedium. Just before the sermon, Uncle Nigel, settling himself in his corner, would feel, as if absently, in his waistcoat pocket and then slip a lime-drop into her hand. The sharply sweet flavor filled her with balmy content, and could, with discretion in the use of the tongue, be prolonged for ten minutes.

But to-day her eyes and thoughts were fixed on Gavan; and when the lime-drop was in her mouth she crunched it mechanically and heedlessly: how he held his prayer-book, his pallid, melancholy profile bent above it, how he sat gravely listening to Mr. MacNab, how he prayed and sang. Only toward the end of the sermon was the tension of her spirit relieved by seeing humanizing symptoms of weariness. She was sure that he was hearing as little as she was—his thoughts were far away; and when he put up a hand to hide a yawn her jaws stretched themselves in quick sympathy. Gavan’s eyes at this turned on her and he smiled openly and delightfully at her. Delightfully; yet the very fact of his daring to smile made him more grown up than ever. Such maturity, such strange spiritual assurance, could afford lightnesses. He brought with him, into the fresh, living world outside, his aura of mystery.

Eppie walked beside her uncle and still observed Gavan as he went before them with the aunts.

“How do you like your playmate, Eppie?” the general asked.

“He isn’t a playmate,” Eppie gravely corrected him.

“Not very lively? But a nice boy, eh?”

“I think he is very nice; but he is too big to care about me.”

“Nonsense; he’s but three years older.”

“Four, Uncle Nigel. That makes a great deal of difference at our ages,” said Eppie, wisely.

“Nonsense,” the general repeated. “He is only a bit down on his luck; he’s not had time to find you out yet. To-morrow he joins you in your Greek and history, and I fancy he’ll see that four years’ difference isn’t such a difference when it comes to some things. Not many chits of your age are such excellent scholars.”

“But I think that we will always be very different,” said Eppie, though at her uncle’s commendation her spirits had risen.

III

REEK and history proved, indeed, a bond. The two children, during the hours in the library, met on a more equal footing, for Gavan was backward with his studies. But the question of inequality had not come up in Gavan’s consciousness. “I’m only afraid that I shall bore her,” he hastened, in all sincerity, to say when the general appealed to a possible vanity in him by hoping that he didn’t mind being kind to a little girl and going about with her. “She’s the only companion we have for you, you see. And we all find her very good company, in spite of her ten years.”

And at this Gavan said, with a smile that protested against any idea that he should not find her so: “I’m only afraid that I’m not good company for any one. She is a dear little girl.”

It was in the wanderings over the moors and in the birch-woods and up the hillside, where Eppie took him to see her views, that the bond really drew to closeness. Here nature and little Eppie seemed together to thaw him, to heal him, to make him unconsciously happy. A fugitive color dawned in his wasted cheeks; a fragile gaiety came to his manner. He began to find it easy to talk, easy to be quite a little boy. And once he did talk, Gavan talked a great deal, quickly, with a sort of nervous eagerness. There grew, in Eppie’s mind, a vast mirage-like picture of the strange land he came from: the great mountains about their high summer home; the blue-shadowed verandas; the flowers he and his mother grew in the garden; the rides at dawn; the long, hot days; the gentle, softly moving servants, some of whom he loved and told her a great deal about. Then the crowds, the swarming colors of the bazaars in the great cities.

“No, no; don’t wish to go there,” he said, taking his swift, light strides through the heather, his head bent, his eyes looking before him—he seldom looked at one, glanced only; “I hate it,—more than you do church!” and though his simile was humorous he didn’t laugh with it. “I hate the thought of any one I care about being there.” He had still, for Eppie, his mystery, and she dimly felt, too, that his greater ease with her made more apparent his underlying sadness; but the sense of being an outsider was gone, and she glowed now at the implication that she was one he cared about.

“It’s vast and meaningless,” said Gavan, who often used terms curiously unboyish. “I can’t describe it to you. It’s like a dream; you expect all the time to wake up and find nothing.”

“I know that I should never love anything so much as Scotland—as heather and pines and sky with clouds. Still, I should like to see India. I should like to see everything that there is to be seen—if I could be sure of always coming back here.”

“Ah, yes, if one could be sure of that.”

“I shall always live here, Gavan,” said Eppie, feeling the skepticism of his “if.”

“Well, that may be so,” he returned, with the manner that made her realize so keenly the difference that was more than a matter of four years.

She insisted now: “I shall live here until I am grown up. Then I shall travel everywhere, all over the world—India, Japan, America; then I shall marry and come back here to live and have twelve children. I don’t believe you care for children as I do, Gavan. How they would enjoy themselves here, twelve of them all together—six boys and six girls.”

Gavan laughed. “Well, I hope all that will come true,” he assented. “Why twelve?”

“I don’t know; but I’ve always thought of there being twelve. I would like as many as possible, and one could hardly remember the names of more. I don’t believe that there are more than twelve names that I care for. But with twelve we should have a birthday-party once a month, one for each month. Did you have birthday-cakes in India, Gavan, with candles for your age?”

“Yes; my mother always had a cake for my birthday.” His voice, in speaking of his mother, seemed always to steel itself, as though to speak of her hurt him. Eppie had felt this directly, and now, regretting her allusion, said, “When is your birthday, Gavan?” thinking of a cake with fifteen candles—how splendid!—to hear disappointingly that the day was not till January, when he would have been gone—long since.

On another time, as they walked up the hillside, beside the burn, she said: “I thought you were not going to like us at all, when you first came.”

“I was horribly afraid of you all,” said Gavan. “Everything was so strange to me.”

“No, you weren’t afraid,” Eppie objected—“not really afraid. I don’t believe you are ever really afraid of people.”

“Yes, I am—afraid of displeasing them, trying them in some way. And I was miserable on that day, too, with anxiety about my poor monkey. I’m sorry I seemed horrid.”

“Not a bit horrid, only very cold and polite.”

“I didn’t realize things much. You see—“ Gavan paused.

“Yes, of course; you weren’t thinking of us. You were thinking of—what you had left.”

“Yes,” he assented, not looking at her.

He went on presently, turning his eyes on her and smiling over a sort of alarm at his own advance to personalities: “You weren’t horrid. I remember that I thought you the nicest little girl I had ever seen. You were all that I did see—standing there in the sun, with a white dress like Alice in Wonderland and with your hair all shining. I never saw hair like it.”

“Do you think it pretty?” Eppie asked eagerly.

“Very—all those rivers of gold in the dark.”

“I am glad. I think it pretty, too, and nurse is afraid that I am vain, I think, for she always takes great pains to tell me that it is striped hair and that she hopes it may grow to be the same color when I’m older.”

“I hope not,” said Gavan, gallantly.

Many long afternoons were spent in the garden, where Eppie initiated him into the sanctities of the summer-house. Gavan’s sense of other people’s sanctities was wonderful. She would never have dreamed of showing her dolls to her cousins; but she brought them out and displayed them to Gavan, and he looked at them and their appurtenances carefully, gravely assenting to all the characteristics that she pointed out. So kind, indeed, so comprehending was he, that Eppie, a delightful project dawning in her mind, asked: “Have you ever played with dolls? I mean when you were very little?”

“No, never.”

“I’ve always had to play by myself,” said Eppie, “and it’s rather dull sometimes, having to carry on all the conversations alone.” And with a rush she brought out, rather aghast at her own hardihood, “I suppose you couldn’t think of playing with me?”

Gavan, at this, showed something of the bashful air of a young bachelor asked to hold a baby, but in a moment he said, “I shouldn’t mind at all, though I’m afraid I shall be stupid at it.”

Eppie flushed, incredulous of such good fortune, and almost reluctant to accept it. “You really don’t mind, Gavan? Boys hate dolls, as a rule, you know.”

“I don’t mind in the least,” he laughed. “I am sure I shall enjoy it. How do we begin? You must teach me.”

“I’ll teach you everything. You are the very kindest person I ever knew, Gavan. Really, I wouldn’t ask you to if I didn’t believe you would like it when once you had tried it. It is such fun. And now we can make them do all sorts of things, have all sorts of adventures, that they never could have before.” She suspected purest generosity, but so trusted in the enchantments he was to discover that she felt herself justified in profiting by it. She placed in his hand Agnes, the fairest of all the dolls, golden-haired, blue-eyed. Agnes was good, and her own daughter, Elspeth, named after herself, was bad. “As bad as possible,” said Eppie. “I have to whip her a great deal.”

Gavan, holding his charge rather helplessly and looking at Elspeth, a doll of sturdier build, with short hair, dark eyes, and, for a doll, a mutinous face, remarked, with his touch of humor, “I thought you didn’t approve of whipping.”

“I don’t,—not real children, or dolls either, except when they are really bad. Mr. MacNab whips his all the time, and they are not a bit bad, really, as Elspeth is.” And Elspeth proceeded to demonstrate how really bad she was by falling upon Agnes with such malicious kicks and blows that Gavan, in defense of his own doll, dealt her a vigorous slap.

“Well done, Mr. Palairet; she richly deserves it! Come here directly, you naughty child,” and after a scuffling flight around the summer-house, Elspeth was secured, and so soundly beaten that Gavan at last interceded for her with the ruthless mother.

“Not until she says that she is sorry.”

“Oh, Elspeth, say that you are sorry,” Gavan supplicated, while he laughed. “Really, Eppie, you are savage. I feel as if you were really hurting some one. Please forgive her now; Agnes has, I am sure.”

“I hurt her because I love her and want her to be a good child. She will come to no good end when she grows up if she cannot learn to control her temper. What is it I hear you say, Elspeth?”

Elspeth, in a low, sullen voice that did not augur well for permanent amendment, whispered that she was sorry, and was led up, crestfallen, to beg Agnes’s pardon and to receive a reconciling kiss.

The table was then brought out and laid. Eppie had her small store of biscuits and raisins, and Elspeth and Agnes were sent into the garden to pick currants and flowers. To Agnes was given the task of making a nosegay for the place of each guest. There were four of these guests, bidden to the feast with great ceremony: three, pink and curly, of little individuality, and the fourth a dingy, armless old rag-doll, reverently wrapped in a fine shawl, and with a pathetic, half-obliterated face.

“Very old and almost deaf,” Eppie whispered to Gavan. “Everybody loves her. She lost her arms in a great fire, saving a baby’s life.”

Gavan was entering into all the phases of the game with such spirit, keeping up Agnes’s character for an irritating perfection so aptly that Eppie forgot to wonder if his enjoyment were as real as her own. But suddenly the doorway was darkened, and glancing up, she saw her uncle’s face, long-drawn with jocular incredulity, looking in upon them. Then, and only then, under the eyes of an uncomprehending sex, did the true caliber of Gavan’s self-immolation flash upon her. A boy, a big boy, he was playing dolls with a girl; it was monstrous; as monstrous as the general’s eyes showed that he found it. Stooping in his tall slightness, as he assisted Agnes’s steps across the floor, he seemed, suddenly, a fairy prince decoyed and flouted. What would Uncle Nigel think of him? She could almost have flung herself before him protectingly.

The general had burst into laughter. “Now, upon my word, this is too bad of you, Eppie!” he cried, while Gavan, not abandoning his hold on Agnes’s arm, turned his eyes upon the intruder with perfect serenity. “You are the most unconscionable little tyrant. You kept the Grainger boys under your thumb; but I didn’t think you could carry wheedling or bullying as far as this. Gavan, my dear boy, you are too patient with her.”

Eppie stood at the table, scarlet with anger and compunction. Gavan had raised himself, and, still holding Agnes, looked from one to the other.

“But she hasn’t bullied me; she hasn’t wheedled me,” he said. “I like it.”

“At your age, my dear boy! Like doll-babies!”

“Indeed I do.”

“This is the finest bit of chivalry I’ve come across for a long time. The gentleman who jumped into the lions’ den for his mistress’s glove was hardly pluckier. Drop that ridiculous thing and come away. I’ll rescue you.”

“But I don’t want to be rescued. I really am enjoying myself. It’s not a case of courage at all,” Gavan protested.

This was too much. He should not tarnish himself to shield her, and Eppie burst out: “Nonsense, Gavan. I asked you to. You are only doing it because you are so kind, and to please me. It was very wrong of me. Put her down as Uncle Nigel says.”

“There, our little tyrant is honest, at all events. Drop it, Gavan. You should see the figure you cut with that popinjay in your arms. Come, you’ve won your spurs. Come away with me.”

But Gavan, smiling, shook his head. “No, I don’t want to, thanks. I did it to please her, if you like; but now I do it to please myself. Playing with dolls is a most amusing game,—and you are interrupting us at a most interesting point,” he added. He seemed, funnily, doll and all, older than the general as he said it. Incredulous but mystified, Uncle Nigel was forced to beat a retreat, and Gavan was left confronting his playmate.

“Why did you tell him that you enjoyed it?” she cried. “He’ll think you unmanly.”

“My dear Eppie, he won’t think me unmanly at all. Besides, I don’t care if he does.”

“I care.”

“But, Eppie, you take it too hard. Why should you care? It’s only funny. Why shouldn’t we amuse ourselves as we like? We are only children.”

“You are much more than a child. Uncle Nigel thinks so, too, I am sure.”

“All the more reason, then, for my having a right to amuse myself as I please. And I am a child, for I do amuse myself.”

Eppie stood staring out rigidly at the blighted prospect, and he took her unyielding hand. “Poor Elspeth is lying on her face. Do let us go on. I want you to hear what Agnes has to say next.”

She turned to him now. “I don’t believe a word you say. You only did it for me. You are only doing it for me now.”

“Well, what if I did? What if I do? Can’t I enjoy doing things for you? And really, really, Eppie, I do think it fun. I assure you I do.”

“I think you are a hero,” Eppie said solemnly, and at this absurdity he burst into his high, shrill laugh, and renewed his supplications; but supplications were in vain. She refused to let him play with her again. He might do things for the dolls,—yes, she reluctantly consented to that at last,—he might take the part of robber or of dangerous wild beast in the woods, but into domestic relations, as it were, he should not enter with them; and from this determination Gavan could not move her.

As far as his dignity in the eyes of others went, he might have gone on playing dolls with her all summer; Eppie realized, with surprise and relief, that Gavan’s assurance had been well founded. Uncle Nigel, evidently, did not think him unmanly, and there was no chaffing. It really was as he had said, he was so little a child that he could do as he chose. His dignity needed no defense.

But though the doll episode was not to be repeated, other and more equal ties knit her friendship with Gavan. Wide vistas of talk opened from their lessons, from their readings together. As they rambled through the heather they would talk of the Odyssey, of Plutarch’s Lives, of nearer great people and events in history. Gavan listened with smiling interest while Eppie expressed her hatreds and her loves, correcting her vehemence, now and then, by a reference to mitigatory circumstance. Penelope was one of the people she hated. “See, Gavan, how she neglected her husband’s dog while he was away—let him starve to death on a dunghill.”

Gavan surmised that the Homeric Greeks had little sense of responsibility about dogs.

“They were horrid, then,” said Eppie. “Dear Argos! Think of him trying to wag his tail when he was dying and saw Ulysses; he was horrid, too, for he surely might have just stopped for a moment and patted his head. I’m glad that Robbie didn’t live in those times. You wouldn’t let Robbie die on a dunghill if I were to go away!”

“No, indeed, Eppie!” Gavan smiled.

“I think you really love Robbie as much as I do, Gavan. You love him more than Uncle Nigel does. One can always see in people’s eyes how much they love a dog. That fat, red Miss Erskine simply feels nothing for them, though she always says ‘Come, come,’ to Robbie. But her eyes are like stones when she looks at him. She is really thinking about her tea, and watching to see that Aunt Rachel puts in plenty of cream. I suppose that Penelope looked like her, when she used to see Argos on the dunghill.”

Robbie was plunging through the heather before them and paused to look round at them, his delicate tongue lapping in little pants over his teeth.

“Darling Robbie,” said Gavan. “Our eyes aren’t like stones when we look at you! See him smile, Eppie, when I speak to him. Wouldn’t it be funny if we smiled with our ears instead of with our mouths.”

Gavan, after a moment, sighed involuntarily and deeply.

“What is the matter?” Eppie asked quickly, for she had grown near enough to ask it. And how near they were was shown after a little silence, by Gavan saying: “I was only wishing that everything could be happy at once, Eppie. I was thinking about my mother and wishing that she might be here with you and me and Robbie.” His voice was steadied to its cold quiet as he said it, though he knew how safe from any hurt he was with her. And she said nothing, and did not look at him, only, in silence, putting a hand of comradeship on his shoulder while they walked.

IV

NCE a week, on the days of the Indian mail, Eppie’s understanding hovered helplessly about Gavan, seeing pain for him and powerless to shield him from it. Prayers took place in the dining-room ten minutes before breakfast, and with the breakfast the mail was brought in, so that Gavan’s promptest descent could not secure him a solitary reading of the letter that, Eppie felt, he awaited with trembling eagerness.

“A letter from India, Gavan dear,” Miss Rachel, the distributer of the mail would say. “Tell us your news.” And before them all, in the midst of the general’s comments on politics, crops, and weather, the rustling of newspapers, the pouring of tea, he was forced to open and read his letter and to answer, even during the reading, the kindly triviality of the questions showered upon him. “Yes, thank you, very well indeed. Yes, in Calcutta. Yes, enjoying herself, I think, thanks.” His pallor on these occasions, his look of hardened endurance, told Eppie all that it did not tell the others. And that his eagerness was too great for him to wait until after breakfast, she saw, too. A bright thought of rescue came to her at last. On the mornings when the Indian mail was due, she was up a good hour before her usual time. Long before the quaint, musical gong sounded its vague, blurred melody for prayers, she was out of the house and running through the birch-woods to the village road, where, just above the church, she met the postman. He was an old friend, glad to please the young lady’s love of importance, and the mail was trusted to her care. Eppie saved all her speed for the return. Every moment counted for Gavan’s sheltered reading. She felt as if, her back to its door, she stood before the sheltered chamber of their meeting, guarding their clasp and kiss, sweet and sorrowful, from alien eyes. Flushed, panting, she darted up to his room, handing his letter in to him, while she said in an easy, matter-of-fact tone, “Your mail, Gavan.”

Gavan, like the postman, attributed his good luck to Eppie’s love of importance, and only on the third morning discovered her manœuver.

He came down early himself to get his own letter, found that the mail had not arrived, and, strolling disappointedly down the drive, was almost knocked down by Eppie rushing in at the gate. She fell back, dismayed at the revelation that must force the fullness of her sympathy upon him—almost as if she herself glanced in at the place of meeting.

“I’ve got the letters,” she said, leaning on the stone pillar and recovering her breath. “There’s one for you.” And she held it out.

But for once Gavan’s concentration seemed to be for her rather than for the letter. “My mother’s letter?” he said.

She nodded.

“It was you, then. I wondered why they came so much earlier.”

“I met the postman; he likes to be saved that much of his walk.”

“You must have to go a long way to get them so early. You went on purpose for me, I think.”

Looking aside, she now had to own: “I saw that you hated reading them before us all. I would hate it, too.”

“Eppie, my dearest Eppie,” said Gavan. Glancing at him, she saw tears in his eyes, and joy and pride flamed up in her. He opened the letter and read it, walking beside her, his hand on her shoulder, showing her that he did not count her among “us all.”

After that they went together to meet the postman, and, unasked, Gavan would read to her long pieces from what his mother said.

It was a few weeks later, on one of these days, that she knew, from his face while he read, and from his silence, that bad news had come. He left her at the house, making no confidence, and at breakfast, when he came down to it later, she could see that he had been struggling for self-mastery. This pale, controlled face, at which she glanced furtively while they did their lessons in the library, made her think of the Spartan boy, calm over an agony. Even the general noticed the mechanical voice and the pallor and asked him if he were feeling tired this morning. Gavan owned to a headache.

“Off to the moors directly, then,” said the general; “and you, too, Eppie. Have a morning together.”

Eppie sat over her book and said that perhaps Gavan would rather go without her; but Gavan, who had risen, said quickly that he wanted her to come. “Let us go to the hilltop,” he said, when they were outside in the warm, scented sunlight.

They went through the woods, where the burn ran, rippling loudly, and the shadows were blue on the little, sandy path that wound among pines and birches. Neither spoke while they climbed the gradual ascent. They came out upon the height that ran in a long undulation to the far lift of mountain ranges. Under a solitary group of pines they sat down.

The woods of Kirklands were below them, and then the vast sea of purple, heaving in broad, long waves to the azure, intense and clear, of the horizon. The wind sighed, soft and shrill, through the pines above them, and far away they heard a sheep-bell tinkle. Beyond the delicate miniature of the village a wind-mill turned slow, gray sails. The whole world, seemed a sunlit island floating in the circling blue. Robbie sat at their feet, alert, upright, silhouetted against the sky.

“Robbie, Robbie,” said Gavan, gently, as he leaned forward and stroked the dog’s back. Eppie, too, stroked with him. The silence of his unknown grief weighed heavily on her heart and she guessed that though for him the pain of silence was great, the pain of speech seemed greater.

He presently raised himself again, clasping both hands about his knees and looking away into the vast distance. His head, with its thick hair, its fine, aquiline nose and delicately jutting chin, made Eppie think, vaguely, of a picture she had seen of a young Saint Sebastian, mutely enduring arrows, on a background of serene sky. With the thought, the silence became unendurable; she strung herself to speak. “Tell me, Gavan,” she said, “have you had bad news?”

He cast her a frightened glance, and, looking down, began to pull at the heather. “No, not bad news, exactly.”

Eppie drew a breath of dubious relief. “But you are so unhappy about something.”

Gavan nodded.

“But why, if it’s not bad news?”

After a pause he said, and she knew, with all the pain of it, what the relief of speaking must be: “I guess at things. I always feel if she is hiding things.”

“Perhaps you are only imagining.”

“I wish I could think it; but I know not. I know what is happening to her.”

He was still wrenching away at the heather, tossing aside the purple sprays with their finely tangled sandy roots. Suddenly he put his head on his knees, hiding his face.

“Oh, Gavan! Oh, don’t be so unhappy,” Eppie whispered, drawing near him, helpless and awe-struck.

“How can I be anything but unhappy when the person I care most for is miserable—miserable, and I am so far from her?” His shoulders heaved; she saw that he was weeping.

Eppie, at first, gazed, motionless, silent, frozen with a child’s quick fear of demonstrated grief. A child’s quick response followed. Throwing her arms around him, she too burst into tears.

It was strange to see how the boy’s reserves melted in the onslaught of this hot, simple sympathy. He turned to her, hiding his face on her shoulder, and they cried together.

“I didn’t want to make you unhappy, too,” Gavan said at last in a weakened voice. His tears were over first and he faintly smiled as he met Robbie’s alarmed, beseeching eyes. Robbie had been scrambling over them, scratching, whining, licking their hands and cheeks in an exasperation of shut-out pity.

“I’m not nearly so unhappy as when you don’t say anything and I know that you are keeping things back,” Eppie choked, pushing Robbie away blindly. “I’d much rather be unhappy if you are.”

It was Gavan, one arm around the rejected Robbie, who had to dry her tears, trying to console her with: “Perhaps I did imagine more than there actually is. One can’t help imagining—at this distance.” He smiled at her, as he had smiled at Robbie, and holding her hand, he went on: “She is so gentle, and so lonely, and so unhappy. I could help her out there. Here, I am so helpless.”

“Make her come here!” Eppie cried. “Write at once and make her come. Send a wire, Gavan. Couldn’t she be here very soon, if you wired that she must—must come? I wouldn’t bear it if I were you.”

“She can’t come. She must stay with my father.”

All the barriers were down now, so that Eppie could insist: “She would rather be with you. You want her most.”

“Yes, I want her most. But he needs her most,” said Gavan. “He is extravagant and weak and bad. He drinks and he gambles, and if she left him he would probably soon ruin himself—and us; for my mother has no money. She could not leave him if she would. And though he is often very cruel to her, he wants her with him.” Gavan spoke with all his quiet, but he had flushed as if from a still anger. “Money is an odious thing, Eppie. That’s what I want to do, as soon as I can: make money for her.” He added presently: “I pray for strength to help her.”

There was a long silence after this. Gavan lay back on the heather, his hat tilted over his tired eyes. Eppie sat above him, staring out at the empty blue. Her longing, her pity, her revolt from this suffering,—for herself and for him,—her vague but vehement desires, flew out—out; she almost seemed to see them, like strong, bright birds flying so far at last that the blue engulfed them. The idea hurt her. She turned away from the dissolving vastness before which it was impossible to think or feel, turned her head to look down at the long, white form beside her, exhausted and inert. Darling Gavan. How he suffered. His poor mother, too. She saw Gavan’s mother in a sort of padlocked palanquin under a burning sky, surrounded by dazzling deserts, a Blue-beard, bristling with swords, reeling in a drunken sentinelship round her prison. Considering Gavan, with his hidden face, the thought of his last words came more distinctly to her. A long time had passed, and his breast was rising quietly, almost as if he slept. Conjecture grew as to the odd form of action in which he evidently trusted. “Do you pray a great deal, Gavan?” she asked.

He nodded under the hat.

“Do you feel as if there was a God—quite near you—who listened?”

“I wouldn’t want to live unless I could feel that.”

Eppie paused at this, perplexed, and asked presently, with a slight embarrassment, “Why not?”

“Nothing would have any meaning,” said Gavan.

“No meaning, Gavan? You would still care for your mother and want to help her, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, but without God there would be no hope of helping her, no hope of strength. Why, Eppie,” came the voice from behind the hat, “without God life would be death.”

Eppie retired to another discomfited silence. “I am afraid I don’t think much about God,” she confessed at last. “I always feel as if I had strength already—I suppose, heaps and heaps of strength. Only—to-day—I do know more what you mean. If only God would do something for you and your mother. You want something so big to help you if you are very, very unhappy.”

“Yes, and some one to turn to when you are lonely.”

Again Eppie hesitated. “Well, but, Gavan, while you’re here you have me, you know.”

At this Gavan pushed aside his hat almost to laugh at her. “What a funny little girl you are, Eppie! What a dear little girl! Yes, of course, I have you. But when I go away? And even while I’m here,—what if we were both lonely together? Can’t you imagine that? The feeling of being lost in a great forest at night. You have such quaint ideas about God.”

“I’ve never had any ideas at all. I’ve only thought of Some One who was there,—Some One I didn’t need yet. I’ve always thought of God as being more for grown-up people. Lost in a forest together? I don’t think I would mind that so much, Gavan. I don’t think I would be frightened, if we were together.”

“I didn’t exactly mean it literally,—not a real forest, perhaps.” He had looked away from her, and, his thin, white face sunken among the heather, his eyes were on the blue immensities where her thoughts had lost themselves. “I am so often frightened. I get so lost sometimes that I can hardly believe that that Some One is near me. And then the fear becomes a sort of numbness, so that I hardly seem there myself; it’s only loneliness, while I melt and melt away into nothing. Even now, when I look at that sky, the feeling creeps and creeps, that dreadful loneliness, where there isn’t any I left to know that it’s lonely—only a feeling.” He shut his eyes resolutely. “My mother always says that it is when one has such fancies that one must pray and have faith.”

Eppie hardly felt that he spoke to her, and she groped among his strange thoughts, seizing the most concrete of them, imitating his shutting out of the emptiness by closing her own eyes. “Yes,” she said, reflecting in the odd, glowing dimness, “I am quite sure that you have much more feeling about God when you think hard, inside yourself, than when you look at the sky.”

“Only then, there are chasms inside, too.” Gavan’s hand beside him was once more restlessly pulling at the heather. “Even inside, one can fall, and fall, and fall.”

The strange tone of his voice—it was indeed like the far note of a falling bell, dying in an abyss—roused Eppie from her experiments. She shook his shoulder. “Open your eyes, Gavan; please, at once. You make me feel horridly. I would rather have you look at the sky than fall inside like that.”

He raised himself on an arm now, with a gaze, for a moment, vague, deadened, blank, then sprang to his feet. “Don’t let’s look. Don’t let’s fall. We must pray and have faith. Eppie, I have made you so pale. Dear Eppie, to care so much. Please forgive me for going to pieces like that.”

Eppie was on her feet, too. “But I want you to. You know what I mean: never hide things. Oh, Gavan, if I could only help you.”

“You do. It is because you care, just in the way you do, that I could go to pieces,—and it has helped me to be so selfish.”

“Please be selfish, often, often, then. I always am caring. And just wait till I am grown up. I shall do something for you then. I’ll make money, too, Gavan.”

“Eppie, you are the dearest little girl,” he repeated, in a shaken voice; and at that she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. The boy’s eyes filled with tears. They stood under the sighing pines, high in the blue, and the scent of the heather was strong, sweet, in the sunny air. Gavan did not return the kiss, but holding her face between his hands, stammering, he said, “Eppie, how can I bear ever to leave you?”

V

N looking back, after long years, at their summer, Eppie could see, more clearly than when she lived in it, that sadness and Gavan had always gone together. He had, as it were, initiated her into suffering. Sadness was the undertone of their sweet comradeship. Their happy stories came to tragic endings. Death and disaster, though in trivial forms, followed him.

With his returning strength, and perhaps with a sense of atonement to her for what he had called his selfishness, Gavan plunged eagerly into any outer interest that would please her. He spent hours in building for her a little hut on the banks of the brae among the birches: the dolls’ Petit Trianon he called it, as the summer-house was their Versailles. They had been reading about the French Revolution. Eppie objected to the analogy. “I should always imagine that Elspeth’s head were going to be cut off if I called it that.”

Gavan said that Elspeth need not be the queen, but a less exalted, more fortunate court lady. “We’ll imagine that she escaped early from France with all her family, saw none of the horrors, was a happy émigrée in England and married there,” he said; and he went on, while he hammered at the pine boughs, with a desultory and reassuring account of Elspeth’s English adventures. But poor Elspeth came to as sad an end as any victim of the guillotine. Eppie was carrying her one day when she and Gavan had followed Aunt Barbara on some housewifely errand up to the highest attic rooms. Outside the low sills of the dormer-windows ran a narrow stone gallery looking down over the pine-tree and the garden. The children squeezed out through the window to hang in delighted contemplation over the birds’-eye view, and then Eppie crawled to a farther corner where one could see round to the moorland and find oneself on a level, almost, with the rooks’ nests in the lime-trees. She handed Elspeth to Gavan to hold for her while she went on this adventure.

He had just risen to his feet, looking down from where he stood over the low parapet, when a sudden cry from Eppie—a great bird sailing by that she called to him to look at—made him start, almost losing his balance on the narrow ledge. Elspeth fell from his arms.

She was picked up on the garden path, far, far beneath, with a shattered head. Gavan, perhaps, suffered more from the disaster than Eppie herself. He was sick with dismay and self-reproach. She was forced to make light of her grief to soothe his. But she did not feel that her soothing hoodwinked or comforted him. Indeed, after that hour on the hilltop, when he showed her his sorrow and his fear, Eppie felt that though near, very near him, she was also held away. It was as if he felt a discomfort in the nearness, or a dread that through it he might hurt again or be hurt. He was at once more loving and more reticent. His resolute cheerfulness, when they could be cheerful, was a wall between them.

Once more, and only once, before their childhood together ended, was she to see all, feel all, suffer all with him. Toward the end of the summer Robbie sickened and died. For three nights the children sat up with him, taking turns at sleep, refusing alien help. By candle-light, in Eppie’s room, they bent over Robbie’s basket, listening to his laboring breath. The general, protesting against the folly of the sleepless nights, yet tiptoed in and out, gruffly kind, moved by the pathos of the young figures. He gave medical advice and superintended the administering of teaspoonfuls of milk and brandy. That he thought Robbie’s case a hopeless one the children knew, for all his air of reassuring good cheer.

Robbie died early on the morning of the fourth day. A little while before, he faintly wagged his tail when they spoke to him, raising eyes unendurably sad.

Eppie, during the illness, had been constantly in tears; Gavan had shown a stoic fortitude. But when all was over and Eppie was covering Robbie with the white towel that was to be his shroud, Gavan suddenly broke down. Casting his arms around her, hiding his face against her, he burst into sobs, saying in a shuddering voice, while he clung to her, shaken all through with the violence of his weeping: “Oh, I can’t bear it, Eppie! I can’t bear it!”

Before this absolute shattering Eppie found her own self-control. Holding him to her,—and she almost thought that he would have fallen if she had not so held him,—she murmured, “Gavan, darling Gavan, I know, I know.”

“Oh, Eppie,” he gasped, “we will never see him again.”

She had drawn him down to the window-seat, where they leaned together, and she was silent for a moment at his last words. But suddenly her arms tightened around him with an almost vindictive tenderness. “We will,” she said.

“Never! Never!” Gavan gasped. “His eyes, Eppie,—his eyes seemed to know it; they were saying good-by forever. And, oh, Eppie, they were so astonished—so astonished,” he repeated, while the sobs shook him.

“We will,” Eppie said again, pressing the boy’s head to hers, while she shut her eyes over the poignant memory. “Why, Gavan, I don’t know much about God, but I do know about heaven. Animals will go to heaven; it wouldn’t be heaven unless they were there.”

That memory of the astonishment in Robbie’s eyes seemed to put knives in her heart, but over the sharpness she grasped her conviction.

In all the despair of his grief, the boy had, in answering her, the disciplined logic of his more formal faith, more clearly seen fact.

“Dear Eppie, animals have no souls.”

“How do you know?” she retorted, almost with anger.

“One only has to think. They stop, as Robbie has.”

“How do you know he has stopped? It’s only,” said Eppie, groping, “that he doesn’t want his body any longer.”

“But it’s Robbie in his body that we want. It’s his body, with Robbie in it, that we know. God has done with wanting him—that’s it, perhaps; but we want him. Oh, Eppie, it’s no good: as we know him, as we want him, he is dead—dead forever. Besides,”—in speaking this Gavan straightened himself,—“we shall forget him.” He turned, in speaking, from her consolations, as though their inefficiency hurt him.

“I won’t forget him,” said Eppie.

Gavan made no reply. He had risen, and standing now at the widely opened window, looked out over the chill, misty dawn. Beneath was the garden, its golden-gray walls rippling with green traceries, the clotted color of the hanging fruit among them. Over the hilltop, the solitary group of pines, the running wave of mountain, was a great piece of palest blue, streaked with milky filaments. The boughs of the pine-tree were just below the window, drenched with dew through all their fragrant darkness.

Eppie, too, rose, and stood beside him.

The hardened misery on his young face hurt her childish, yet comprehending heart even more than Robbie’s supplicating and astonished eyes had done. She could imagine that look of steeled endurance freezing through it forever, and an answering hardness of opposition rose in her to resist and break it. “We won’t forget him.”

“People do forget,” Gavan answered.

She found a cruel courage. “Could you forget your mother?”

Gavan continued to look stonily out of the window and did not answer her.

“Could you?” she repeated.

“Don’t, Eppie, don’t,” he said.

She saw that she had stirred some black terror in him, and her ignorant, responsive fear made her pitiless: “Could you forget her if she died? Never. Never as long as you lived.”

“Already,” he said, as though the words were forced from him by her will, “I haven’t remembered her all the time.”

“She is there. You haven’t forgotten her.”

“Years and years come. New things come. Old things fade and fade,—all but the deepest things. They couldn’t fade. No,” he repeated, “they couldn’t. Only, even they might get dimmer.”

She saw that he spoke from an agony of doubt, and he seemed to wrench the knife she had stabbed him with from his heart as he added: “But Robbie is such a little thing. And little things people do forget, I am sure of it. It’s that that makes them so sad.”

“Well, then,”—Eppie, too, felt the relief of the lesser pain,—“they will remember again. When you see Robbie in heaven you will remember all about him. But I won’t forget him,” she repeated once more, swallowing the sob that rose chokingly at the thought of how long it would be till they should see Robbie in heaven.

Gavan had now a vague, chill smile for the pertinacity of her faith. Something had broken in him, as if, with Robbie’s passing, a veil had been drawn from reality, an illusion of confidence dispelled forever. He leaned out of the window and breathed in the scent of the wet pine-tree, looking, with an odd detachment and clearness of observation,—as if through that acceptation of tragedy all his senses had grown keener,—at the bluish bloom the dew made upon the pine-needles; at the flowers and fruit in the garden below, the thatched roof of the summer-house, the fragile whiteness of the roses growing near it, like a bridal veil blown against the ancient wall. It was, in a moment of strange, suspended vision, as if he had often and often seen tragic dawn in the garden before and was often to see it again. What was he? Where was he? All the world was like a dream and he seemed to see to its farthest ends and back to its beginnings.

Eppie stood silent beside him.

He was presently conscious of her silence, and then, the uncanny crystal, gazing sense slipping from him, of a possible unkindness in his repudiating grief. He looked round at her. The poor child’s eyes, heavy with weeping and all the weight of the dark, encompassing woe he had shown her, dwelt on him with a somber compassionateness.

“Poor, darling little Eppie,” he said, putting an arm about her, “what a brute, a selfish brute, I am.”

“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.

“Am I not to come back here next summer?” he asked.

“I’m afraid not, Gavan; we haven’t first claim, you see. Perhaps Sir James will lend you to us now and then; but from what I know of him I imagine that he will want to do a lot with you, to put you through a great deal. There won’t be much time for this sort of thing. You will probably travel with him.”

They were in the library and, speaking from the depths of her fear, Eppie asked: “Do you like Sir James, Uncle Nigel?” She suspected a pitying quality in the cogitating look that the general bent upon Gavan.

“I hardly know him, my dear. He is quite an eminent man. A little severe, perhaps,—something of a martinet,—but just, conscientious. It is a great thing for Gavan,” the general continued, making the best of a rather bleak prospect, “to have such an uncle to give him a start in life. It means the best sort of start.”

Directly the two children were alone, both sitting in the deep window-seat, Gavan said, “Don’t worry, Eppie. Of course I’ll come back—soon.” His face took on the hardness that its delicacy could so oddly express. He was confronting his ambiguous fate in an attitude of cold resolution. For his sake, Eppie controlled useless outcries. “You have seen your uncle, Gavan?”

“Yes, once; in India. He came up to Darjeeling one summer.”

“Is he nice—nicer than Uncle Nigel made out, I mean?”

“He isn’t like my father,” said Gavan, after a moment.

“You mean that he isn’t wicked?” Eppie asked baldly.

“Oh, a good deal more than that. He is just and conscientious, as the general said. That’s what my mother felt; that’s why she could bear it, my going to him. And the general is right, you know, Eppie, about its being a great thing for me. He is a very important person, in his way, and he is going to put me through. He is determined that my father sha’n’t spoil my life. And, as you know, Eppie, my mother’s life, any chance for her, depends on me. To make her life, to atone to her in any way for all she has had to bear, I must make my own. My uncle will help me.”

The steeliness of his resolves made his face almost alien. Eppie felt this unknown future, where he must fight alone, for objects in which she had no share, shutting her out, and a child’s sick misery of desolation filled her, bringing back the distant memory of her mother’s death, that suffocating sense of being left behind and forgotten; but, keeping her eyes on his prospect, she managed in a firm voice to question him about the arid uncle, learned that he was married, childless, had a house in the country and one in London, and sat in Parliament. He was vastly busy, traveled a great deal, and wrote books of travel; not books about foreign people and the things they ate and wore, as Eppie with her courageous interest hopefully surmised, but books of dry, colorless fact, with lots of statistics in them, Gavan said.

“He wants me to go in for the same sort of thing—politics and public life.”

“You are going to be a Pitt—make laws, Gavan, like Pitt?” Eppie kept up her dispassionate tone.

He smiled at the magnified conception. “I’ll try for a seat, probably, or some governmental office; that is, if I turn out to be worth anything.”

How the vague vastness shut her out! What should she do, meanwhile? How carve for herself a future that would keep her near him in the great outside world? And would he want her near him in it when he was to be so great, too? This question brought the irrepressible tears to her eyes at last, though she turned away her head and would not let them fall. But Gavan glanced at her and leaned forward to look, and then she saw, as her eyes met his, that the hard resolve was for her, too, and did not shut her out, but in.

“I’m coming back, Eppie,” he said, taking her hand and holding it tightly. “Next to my mother, it’s you,—you know it.”

“I haven’t any mother,” said Eppie, keeping up the bravery, though it was really harder not to cry now. He understood where she placed him.

Eppie was glad that it was raining on the last morning. Sunshine would have been a mockery, and this tranquilly falling rain, that turned the hills to pale, substanceless ghosts and brought the end of the moor, where it disappeared into the white, so near, was not tragic. Gavan was coming back. She would think only of that. She would not—would not cry. He should see how brave she could be. When he was gone—well, she allowed herself a swift thought of the Petit Trianon, its hidden refuge. There, all alone, she would, of course, howl. There was a grim comfort in this vision of herself, rolling upon the pine-needle carpet of the Petit Trianon and shrieking her woes aloud.

At breakfast Gavan showed a tense, calm face. She was impressed anew with the sense of his strength, for, in spite of his resolves, he was suffering, perhaps more keenly than herself. Suffering, with him, partook of horror. She could live in hopes, and on them. To Gavan, this parting was the going into a dark cavern that he must march through in fear. And then, he would never roll and shriek.

After breakfast, they hardly spoke to each other. Indeed, what was there to say? Eppie filled the moments in superintending the placing of fruit and sandwiches in his dressing-case. The carriage was a little late, so that when the final moment came, there was a hurried conventionality of farewell. Gavan was kissed by the aunts and shook hands with Miss Grimsby, while the general called out that there was no time to lose.

“Come back to us, dear boy; keep your feet dry on the journey,” said Miss Rachel, while Miss Barbara, holding his hand, whispered gently that she would always pray for him.

Eppie and Gavan had not looked at each other, and when the moment came for their farewell, beneath the eyes of aunts, uncle, Miss Grimsby, and the servants, it seemed the least significant of all, was the shortest, the most formal. They looked, they held hands for a moment, and Gavan faltered out some words. Eppie did not speak and kept her firm smile. Only when he had followed the general into the carriage and it was slowly grinding over the gravel did something hot, stinging, choking, flare up in her, something that made her know this smooth parting to be intolerable—not to be borne.

She darted out into the rain. Bobbie was dead; Gavan was gone; why, she was alone—alone—and a question was beating through her as she ran down the drive and, with a leap to its step, caught the heavy old carriage in its careful turning at the gate. Gavan saw, at the window, her white, freckled face, her startled eyes, her tossed hair all beaded with the finely falling rain—like an apparition on the ghostly background of mist.

“Oh, Gavan, don’t forget me!” That had been the flaring terror.

He had just time to catch her hand, to lean to her, to kiss her. He did not speak. Mutely he looked at the little comrade all the things he could not say: what she was to him, what he felt for her, what he would always feel,—always, always, always, his eyes said to hers as she stepped back to the road and was gone.

PART II

I

E had never seen Eppie again, and sixteen years had passed.

It was of this that Gavan was thinking as the Scotch express bore him northward on a dark October night.

A yellow-bound, half-cut volume of French essays lay beside him. He had lighted a cigar and, his feet warmly ensconced on the hot-water tin, his legs enfolded in rugs, the fur collar of his coat turned up about his ears, he leaned back, well fortified against the sharp air that struck in from the half-opened window.

Gavan, at thirty, had oddly maintained all the more obvious characteristics of his boyhood. He was long, pale, emaciated, as he had been at fourteen. His clean-shaved face was the boy’s face, matured, but unchanged in essentials. The broad, steep brow, the clear, aquiline jut of nose and chin, the fineness and strength of the jaw, sculptured now by the light overhead into vehement relief and shadow, were more emphatic, only, than they had been.

At fourteen his face had surprised with its maturity and at thirty it surprised with its quality of wistful boyishness. This was the obvious. The changes were there, but they were subtle, consisting more in a certain hardening of youth’s hesitancy into austerity; as though the fine metal of the countenance had been tempered by time into a fixed, enduring type. His pallor was the scholar’s, but his emaciation the athlete’s; the fragility, now, was a braced and disciplined fragility. No sedentary softness was in him. In his body, as in his face, one felt a delicacy as strong as it was fine. The great change was that hardening to fixity.

To-night, he was feeling the change himself. The journey to Kirklands, after the long gap that lay between it and his farewell, made something of an epoch for his thoughts. He did not find it significant, but the mere sense of comparison was arresting.

The darkness of the October night, speeding by outside, the solitude of the bright railway carriage, London two hours behind and, before, the many hours of his lonely journey,—time and place were like empty goblets, only waiting to be filled with the still wine of memory.

Gavan had not cast aside his book, lighted his cigar, and, leaning back, drawn his rugs about him with the conscious intention of yielding himself to retrospect. On the contrary, he had, at first, pushed aside the thoughts that, softly, persistently, pressed round him. Then the languor, the opportunity of the hour seized him. He allowed himself to drift hither and thither, as first one eddy lapped over him and then another. And finally he abandoned himself to the full current and, once it had him, it carried him far.

It was, at the beginning, as far back as Eppie and childhood that it carried him, to the sunny summer days and to the speechless parting of the rainy autumn morning. And, with all that sense of change, he was surprised to find how very much one thing had held firm. He had never forgotten. He had kept the mute promise of that misty morning. How well he had kept it he hadn’t known until he found the chain of memory hold so firm as he pulled upon it. The promise had been made to himself as well as to her, given in solemn hostage to his own childish fears. Even then what an intuitive dread had been upon him of the impermanence of things. But it wasn’t impermanent after all, that vision.

Dear little Eppie. It was astonishing now to find how well he remembered, how clearly he could see, in looking back,—more clearly than even his acute child’s perception had made evident to him,—what a dear little Eppie she had been. She lived in his memory, and probably nowhere else: in the present Eppie he didn’t fancy that he should find much trace of the child Eppie, and it was sad, in its funny way, to think that he, who had, with all his forebodings, so felt the need of a promise, should so well remember her who, undoubtedly, had long ago forgotten him. He took little interest in the present Eppie. But the child wore perfectly with time.

Dear child Eppie and strange, distant boy, groping toward the present Gavan; unhappy little boy, of deep, inarticulate, passionate affections and of deep hopes and dreads. There they walked, knee-deep in heather; he smelled it, the sun warm upon it, Eppie in her white, Alice-in-Wonderland frock and her “striped” hair. And there went Robbie, plunging through the heather before them.

Robbie. Eppie had been right, then. He had not forgotten him at all. He and Eppie stood at the window looking out at the dawn; the scent of the wet pine-tree was in the air, and their eyes were heavy with weeping. How near they had been. Had any one, in all his life, ever been nearer him than Eppie?

Curious, when he had so well kept the promise never to forget, that the other promise, the promise to return, he had not been able to keep. In making it, he had not imagined, even with his foreboding, what manacles of routine and theory were to be locked upon him for the rest of his boyhood. He had soon learned that protest, pleading, rebellion, were equally vain, and that outward conformity was the preservative of inner freedom. He could not jeopardize the purpose of his life—his mother’s rescue—by a persistence that, in his uncle’s not unkind and not unhumorous eyes, was merely foolish. He was forced to swallow his own longings and to endure, as best he could, his pangs of fear lest Eppie should think him slack, or even faithless. He submitted to the treadmill of a highly organized education, that could spare no time for insignificant summers in Scotland. Every moment in Gavan’s youth was to be made significant by tangible achievement. The distilled knowledge of the past, the intellectual trophies of civilization, were to be his; if he didn’t want them, they, in the finished and effective figure of his uncle, wanted him, and, in the sense of the fulfilment of his uncle’s hopes, they got him.

During those years Gavan wrote to Eppie, tried to make her share with him in all the lonely and rather abstract interests of his life. But he found that the four years of difference, counting for nothing in the actual intercourse of word and look, counted for everything against any reality of intercourse in writing. Translated into that formality, the childish affection became as unlike itself as a pressed flower is unlike a fresh one. Eppie’s letters, punctual and very fond, were far more immature than she herself. These letters gave accounts of animals, walks, lessons, very bald and concise, and of the Grainger cousins and their doings, and then of her new relation, cousin Alicia, whose daughters, children of Eppie’s own age, soon seemed to poor Gavan, in his distant prison, to fill his place. Eppie went away with these cousins to Germany, where they all heard wonderful music, and after that they came to Kirklands for the summer. Altogether, when Gavan’s opportunity came and, with the dignity of seventeen to back his request, he had his uncle’s consent to his spending of a month in Scotland, he felt himself, even as he made it, rather silly in his determination to cling at all costs to something precious but vanishing. Then it was that Eppie had been swept away by the engulfing relative. At the very moment of his own release, she was taken to the Continent for three years of travel and study. The final effort of childhood to hold to its own meaning was frustrated. The letters, after that, soon ceased. Silence ended the first chapter.

Gavan glanced out at the rushing darkness on either side. It was like the sliding of a curtain before the first act of a drama. His cigar was done and he did not light another. His eyes on that darkness that passed and passed, he gave himself up to the long vision of the nearer years. Through them went always the link with childhood, the haunting phrase that sounded in every scene—that fear of life, that deep dread of its evil and its pain that he had tried to hide from Eppie, but that, together, they had glanced at.

In that first chapter, whose page he had just turned, he had seen himself as a very unhappy boy—unhappy from causes as apparent as a cage about a pining bird. His youth had been weighted with an over-mature understanding of wrong and sorrow. His childish faith in supreme good had shaped itself to a conception of life as a place of probation where oneself and, far worse, those one loved were burned continually in the fiery furnace of inexplicable affliction. One couldn’t say what God might not demand of one in the way of endurance. He had, helpless, seen his fragile, shrinking mother hatefully bullied and abused or more hatefully caressed. He had been parted from her to brood and tremble over her distant fate. Loved things had died; loved things had all, it seemed, been taken from him; the soulless machinery of his uncle’s system had ground and polished at his stiffening heart. No wonder that the boy of that first chapter had been very unhappy. But in the later chapters, to which he had now come, the causes for unhappiness were not so obvious, yet the gloom that overhung them deepened. He saw himself at Eton in the hedged-round world of buoyant youth, standing apart, preoccupied, indifferent. He had been oddly popular there. His selflessness, his gentle candor, his capacity for a highly keyed joy,—strung, though it was, over an incapacity for peace,—endeared him; but even to his friends he remained a veiled and ambiguous personality. He seemed to himself to stand on the confines of that artificially happy domain, listening always for the sound of sorrow in the greater world outside. History, growing before his growing mind, loomed blood-stained, cruel, disastrous. The defeat of goodness, its degradation by the triumphant forces of evil, haunted him. The dependence of mind, of soul, on body opened new and ominous vistas. For months he was pursued by morbid fears of what a jostled brain-cell or a diseased body might do to one. One might become a fiend, it seemed, or an imbecile, if one’s atoms were disarranged too much. Life was a tragic duty,—he held to that blindly, fiercely at times; but what if life’s chances made even goodness impossible? what if it were to rob one of one’s very selfhood? It became to him a thing dangerous, uncertain, like an insecurely chained wild beast that one must lie down with and rise with and that might spring at one’s throat at any moment.

Under the pressure of this new knowledge, crude enough in its materialistic forms, and keen, new thought, already subtle, already passing from youthful crudity, the skeptical crash of his religious faith came at last upon him. Religion had meant too much to him for its loss to be the merely disturbing epoch of readjustment that it is in much young development. He found himself in a reeling horror of darkness where the only lights were the dim beacons of science and the fantastic will-o’-the-wisps of estheticism. In the midst of the chaos he saw his mother again. He dreaded the longed-for meeting. How could he see her and hide from her the inner desolation? And when she came, at last, after all these years, a desperate pity nerved him to act a part. She was changed; the years had told on her more than even his imagination had feared. She drooped like a tired, fading flower. She was fading, that he saw at the first glance. Mentally as well as physically, there was an air of withering about her, and the look of sorrow was stamped ineffaceably upon her aging features. To know that he had lost his faith, his hold on life, his trust in good, would have been, he thought, to kill her. He kept from her a whisper of his desolation; and to a fundamental skepticism like his, acting was facile. But when she was gone, back to her parched life, he knew that to her, as well as to him, something essential had lacked. Her love, again and again, must have fluttered, however blindly, against that barrier between them. The years of separation had been sad, but, in looking back at it, the summer of meeting was saddest of all.

The experience put an edge to his hardening strength. He must fail her in essentials; they could never meet in the blessed nearness of shared hopes; but he wouldn’t fail her in all the lesser things of life. The time of her deliverance was near. Love and beauty would soon be about her. He worked at Oxford with the inner passion of a larger purpose than mere scholarship that is the soul of true scholarship. He felt the sharp, cold joy of high achievement, the Alpine, precipitous scaling of the mind. And here he embarked upon the conscious quest for truth, his skepticism grown to a doubt of its own premises.

Gavan looked quietly back upon the turmoil of that quest.

He watched himself in those young years pressing restlessly, eagerly, pursued by the phantoms of death and nothingness, through spiral after spiral of human thought: through Spinoza’s horror of the meaninglessness of life and through Spinoza’s barren peace; through Kant’s skepticism that would not let him rest in Kant’s super-rational assurance; precipitated from Hegel’s dialectics—building their pyramid of paradox to the apex of an impersonal Absolute—into Schopenhauer’s petulant despair. And more and more clearly he saw, through all the forms of thought, that the finite self dissolved like mist in the one all-embracing, all-transcending Subject. Science, philosophy, religion, seemed, in their final development, to merge in a Monism that conceived reality as spirit, but as impersonal spirit, a conception that, if in western thought it did not reduce to illusion every phase of experience, yet reduced the finite self to a contradiction and its sense of moral freedom, upon which were built all the valuations of life and all its sanctions, to a self-deception. His own dual life deepened his abiding intuition of unreality. There was the Gavan of the river, the debate, the dinner, popular among his fellows, gentle, debonair; already the man of the world through the fineness of his perception, his instinct for the fitting, his perfection of mannerless manner that was the flower of selflessness. And there was the Gavan of the inner thought, fixed, always, in its knot of torturing perplexity. To the inner Gavan, the Gavan of human relations was a wraith-like figure. Now began for him the strange experience at which childish terrors had hinted. It was in the exhaustions that followed a long wrench of thought, or after an illness, a shock of sorrow that left one pulseless and inert, that these pauses of an awful peace would come to him. One faced, then, the dread vision, and it seized one, as when, in the deep stillness of the night, the world drops from one and only a consciousness, dispassionate and contemplative, seeing all life as dream, remains. It was when life was thus stilled, its desires quenched by weakness or great sorrow, that this peace stole into the empty chambers, and whispered that all pain, all evil, all life were dreams and that the dreams were made by the strife and restlessness of the fragmentary self in its endless discord. See oneself as discord, as part of the whole, every thought, every act, every feeling determined by it, and one entered, as it were, into the unwilling redemption. Desire, striving, hope, and fear fell from one. One found the secret of the Eternal Now, holding in its timelessness the vast vision of a world of change. But to Gavan, in these moments, the sorrow, the striving, the agony of life was sweet and desirable; for, to the finite life that strove, and hoped, and suffered the vision became the sightless gaze of death, and nothingness was the guerdon of such attainment. To turn, with an almost physical sickness of horror, from the hypnotic spell, to forcibly forget thought, to clasp life about him like a loved Nessus-robe, was a frequent solution during these years of struggle; to reënter the place of joy and sorrow, taking it, so to speak, at its own terms. But the specter was never far from the inner Gavan, who more and more suspected that the longing for reality, for significance, that flamed up in him with each renewal of personal force and energy, was the mere result of life, not its sanction. And more and more, when, in such renewals, his nature turned with a desperate trust to action, as a possible test of worth, he saw that it was not action, not faith, that created life and the trust in life, but life, the force and will incarnated in one, that created faith and action. The very will to act was the will to live, and the will to live was the will of the Whole that the particular discord of one’s personal self should continue to strive and suffer.

Life, indeed, clutched him, and that quite without any artificial effort of his own, when his mother came home to England to die.

Gavan had just left Oxford. He was exquisitely equipped for the best things of life, and, with the achievement, his long dependence on his uncle suddenly ceased. An eccentric old cousin, a scholarly recluse, who had taken a fancy to him, died, leaving him a small estate in Surrey and fifteen hundred pounds a year.

With the good fortune came the bitter irony that turned it to dust and ashes. All his life he had longed to help his mother, to smooth her rough path and put power over fate into her hand. Now he could only help her to die in peace.

He took her to the quiet old house, among its lawns, its hedges, its high-walled gardens and deep woods. He gave her all that it was now too late to give—beauty, ease, and love.

She was changed by disease, more changed than by life and sorrow; gentle, very patient, but only by an effort showing her appreciation of the loveliness, only by an effort answering his love.

Of all his fears the worst had been the fear that, with the conviction of the worthlessness of life, the capacity for love had left him. Now, as with intolerable anguish, her life ebbed from her, there was almost relief in his own despair; in feeling it to the full; in seeing the heartlessness of thought wither in the fierce flame of his agony.

It seemed to him that he had never before known what it was to love. It was as if he were more her than himself. He relived her life and its sorrows. He relived her miserable married years, the long loneliness, parted from her child, her terror of the final parting, coming so cruelly upon them; and he lived the pains of her dissolution. He understood as he had never understood, all that she was and felt; he yearned as he had never yearned, to hold and keep her with him in joy and security; he suffered as he had never suffered.

Such passionate rebellion filled him that he would walk for hours about the country, while merciful anesthetics gave her oblivion, in a blind rage of mere feeling—feeling at a white heat, a core of tormented life. And the worst was that her life of martyrdom was not to be crowned by a martyr’s happy death; the worst was that her own light died away from before her feet, that she groped in darkness, and that, since he was to lose her, he might not even have her to the end.

For months he watched the slow fading of all that had made her herself, her relapse into the instinctive, almost into the animal. Her lips, for many days, kept the courage of their smile, but it was at last only an automatic courage, showing no sweetness, no caress. Her eyes, in the first tragic joy of their reunion, had longed, grieved, yearned over the son who hid his sorrow for her sake. Afterward, all feeling, except a sort of chill resentment, died from her look. For the last days of her life, when, in great anguish, she never spoke at all, these eyes would turn on him with a strange immensity of indifference. It was as if already his mother were gone and as if a ghost had stolen into his life. She died at last, after a long night of unconsciousness, without a word or look that brought them near.

Gavan lived through all that followed in a stupor.

On the day of her funeral, when all was over, he walked out into the spring woods.

The day was sweet and mild. Pools of shallow water shone here and there in the hollows, among the slender tree-stems. Pale slips of blue were seen among the fine, gray branches, and pushing up from last year’s leaves were snowdrops growing everywhere, white and green among the russet leaves, lovely, lovely snowdrops. Seeing them, in his swift, aimless wandering, Gavan paused.

The long nights and days had worn him to that last stage of exhaustion where every sense is stretched fine and sharp as the highest string of a musical instrument. Leaning against a tree, his arms folded, he looked at the snowdrops, at their vivid green, and their white, as fresh, as delicate as flakes of newly fallen snow.

“Lovely, lovely,” he said, and, looking all about him, at the fretwork of gray branches on the blue, the pale, shining water,—a little bird just hopping to its edge among the shorter grass to drink,—he repeated, “Lovely,” while the anguish in his heart and the sweet beauty without combined in the sharp, exquisite tension of a mood about to snap, the fineness of a note, unendurably high, held to an unendurable length.

A dimness overtook him: as if the note, no longer keenly singing, sank to an insect-like buzz, a chaos of minute, whirring vibrations that made a queer, dizzy rhythm; and, in a daze of sudden indifference, both to beauty and anguish, he seemed to see himself standing there, collapsed against the tree, his frail figure outworn with misery,—to see himself, and the trees, the pools of water, the drinking bird, and the snowy flowers,—like a picture held before calm, dying eyes.

“Yes,” he thought, “she saw it like this,—me, herself, life; that is why she didn’t care any longer.”

He continued to look, and from the dimness and the buzzing the calm grew clear—clear as a sharply cut hallucination. He knew the experience, he had often before known it; but he had never yet felt it so unutterably, so finally. Something in him had done struggling forever; something was relinquished; he had accepted something. “Yes, it is like that,” he thought on; “they are all of them right.”

With the cold eye of contemplation he gazed on the illusion of life: joy, suffering, beauty, good and evil. His individual life, enfranchised from its dream of a separate self, drifted into the life about him. He was part of it all; in him, as in those other freed ones, the self suddenly knew itself as fleeting and unsubstantial as a dream, knew its own profound irrationality and the suffering that its striving to be must always mean.

He was perfectly at peace, he who had never known peace. “I am as dead as she is,” he thought.

In his peace he was conscious of no emotion, yet he found himself suddenly leaning his head against the tree and weeping. He wept, but he knew that it was no longer with grief or longing. He watched the exhausted machine give way, and noted its piteous desolation of attitude,—not pitying it,—while he thought, “I shall feel, perhaps suffer, perhaps enjoy again; but I shall always watch myself from above it all.”

The mystic experience had come overwhelmingly to him and his mind was never to lose the effect of that immediacy of consciousness, untransmissible, unspeakable, ineffaceable. And that with which he found himself one was far from any human thoughts or emotions; rather it was the negation of them, the infinite negation of finite restlessness.

He went back to the house, to the darkened, empty room. The memories that crowded there, of pity and love and terror, were now part of the picture he looked at, as near and yet as far, as the vision of the snowdrops, the bird, and the spring sky.

All was quiet. She was gone as he would go. The laboring breath was stilled forever.

II

AVAN did not address himself to an ascetic remodeling of his life. He pursued the path traced out before him. He yielded placidly to the calls of life, willing to work, to accomplish, willing even to indulge his passions, since there could lurk for him no trap among the shows of life. His taste soon drew back, disdainful and delicate, from his experience of youthful dissipation; his ironic indifference made him deaf to the lures of ambition; but he was an accurate and steady worker and a tolerably interested observer of existence.

As he had ceased to have value for himself, so others had no value in his eyes. Social effort and self-realization were, as ideals, equally meaningless to him; and though pity was always with him, it was a pity gentle and meditative, hopeless of alleviation: for suffering was life, and to cure one, one must abolish the other. Material remedies seemed to him worse than useless; they merely renewed the craving forces. The Imitation of Christ was a fitter panacea than organized charities and progressive legislation.

Physical pain in the helpless, the dumbly conscious, in children or animals, hurt him and made him know that he, too, lived; and he would spend himself to give relief to any suffering thing. He sought no further in metaphysical systems; he desired no further insight. Now and then, finding their pensive pastures pleasant, he would read some Hindoo or medieval mystic; but ecstasies were as alien to him as materialism: both were curious forms of self-deception—one the inflation of the illusory self into the loss of any sense of relation, and the other the self’s painful concentration into imbecilely selfish aims. The people most pleasing to him were the people who, without self-doubt and without self-consciousness, performed some inherited function in the state; the simply great in life; or those who, by natural gift, the fortunately finished, the inevitably distinguished, followed some beautifully complex calling. The mediocre and the pretentious were unpleasing phenomena, and the ideals of democracy mere barbarous nonsense.

His own pursuits were those of a fashionable and ambitious man, and, to the casual observer, the utter absence of any of the pose of disillusionized youth made all the more apparent what seemed to be a man of the world cynicism. Those who knew him better found him charming and perplexing. He seemed to have no barriers, yet one could not come near him. His center receded before pursuit. And he was much pursued. He aroused conjecture, interest, attachment. His exquisite head, the chill sweetness of his manner, the strange, piercing charm of his smile, drew eyes and hearts to him. Idly amused, he saw himself, all inert, boosted from step to step, saw friends swarm about him and hardly an enemy’s face.

It was rare for him to meet dislike. One young man, vaguely known at Oxford, noticed with interest as a relative of Eppie’s, he had, indeed, by merely being, it seemed, antagonized. Gavan had really felt something of a shy, derivative affection for this Jim Grainger, a dogged, sullen, strenuous youth; because of the dear old memory, he had made one or two delicate, diffident approaches—approaches repulsed with bull-dog defiance. Gavan, who understood most things, quite understood that to the serious, the plain, the obviously laborious son of an impecunious barrister, he might have given the impression, so funnily erroneous, of a sauntering dilettantism, an aristocratic flânerie. At all events, Grainger was intrenched in a resolute disapproval, colored, perhaps, with some tinge of reminiscent childish jealousy. When their paths again crossed in London and Gavan found his suavity encountered by an even more scowling sarcasm, jealousy, of another type, was an obvious cause. Grainger, scornful of social dexterities and weapons, had worked himself to skin and bone in preparation for a career, and a career that he intended to be of serious significance. And at its outset he found himself in apparent competition with Gavan for a post that, significant indeed to him, as the first rung on the political ladder, could only be decorative to his rival—the post of secretary to a prominent cabinet-minister. Grainger had his justified hopes, and he was, except for outward graces, absolutely fitted for the place.

In his path he found the listless figure of the well-remembered and heartily disliked Gavan—a gilded youth, pure and simple, and as such being lifted, by all accounts, onto the coveted rung of the coveted ladder. Gavan’s scholarly fitness for the post Grainger only half credited. Of the sturdy professional class, with a streak of the easily suspicious bourgeois about him, he was glad to believe tales of drawing-room influence. He expressed himself with disgusted openness as to the fatal effect of a type like Palairet’s on public life. Gavan heard a little and guessed more. He found himself sympathizing with Grainger; he had always liked him. With an effort that he had never used on his own behalf, he managed to get him fitted into the pair of shoes that were standing waiting for his own feet. It had been, indeed, though in superficial ways, an affair of drawing-room influence. The wife of the great statesman, as well as that high personage himself, was one of Gavan’s devoted and baffled friends. She said that he made her think of a half-frozen bird that one longed to take in one’s hands and warm, and she hopefully communed with her husband as to the invigorating effect of a career upon him. She suspected Gavan—his influence over her husband—when she found that an alien candidate was being foisted upon her.

“Grainger!” she exclaimed, vexed and incredulous. “Why Grainger? Why not anybody as well as Grainger? Yes, I’ve seen the young man. He looks like a pugilistic Broad-Church parson. All he wants is to climb and to reform everything.”

“Exactly the type for British politics,” Gavan rejoined. “He is in earnest about politics, and I’m not; you know I’m not.” His friend helplessly owned that he was exasperating. Grainger, had he known to whom he was indebted for his lift, would have felt, perhaps, a heightened wrath against “drawing-room influence.”

Happily and justifiably unconscious, he proceeded to climb.

Meanwhile another pair of shoes was swiftly found for Gavan. He went out to India as secretary to the viceroy.

Here, in the surroundings of his early youth, the second great moral upheaval of his life came to him. Three years had passed since his mother’s death. He was twenty-six years old.

During a long summer among the mountains of Simla, he met Alice Grafton. She was married, a year older than himself, but a girl still in mind and appearance—fragile, hesitant, exquisite. Gavan at his very first seeing of her felt something knocking in his heart. It seemed like pity, instinctive pity, the bond between him and life, and for some time he deluded himself with this comparatively safe interpretation. He did not quite know why he should pity Mrs. Grafton. That she should look like a girl was hardly a reason, nor that her husband, large, masterful, embossed with decorations, was uninteresting. She had been married to him—by all accounts the phrase applied—at nineteen and could not find him sympathetic; but, after all, many cheerful women were in that situation. He was a kindly, an admiring husband, and her life was set in luxurious beauty. Yet piteousness was there. She was all promise and unfulfilment; and dimly, mutely, she seemed to feel that the promise would never be fulfilled, as though a too-early primrose smiled wistfully through a veil of ice. Should she never become consciously unhappy that would be but another symptom of permanent immaturity.

Gavan rode with her and talked with her, and read with her in her fresh, flower-filled drawing-room. Their tastes were not at all alike; but he did not in the least mind that when she lifted her lovely eyes to him over poor poetry; and when she played and sang to him her very ineffectuality added a pathos, full of charm, to the obvious ballads that she liked. It was sweet, too, and endearing, to watch her, by degrees, molding her taste to his until it became a delightful and intuitive echo.

He almost wondered if it was also in echo that she began to feel for herself his own appreciation of her. Certainly she matured to consciousness of lack. She began to confide; not with an open frankness, but vaguely, as though she groped toward the causes of her sadness. She shrank, and knew now why she shrank, when her loud-voiced, cheerful husband came tramping into the room. Then she began to see that she was horribly lonely. Unconsciously, in the confidences now, she plead for help, for reassurance. She probed him constantly as to religious hopes and the real significance of life. Her soft voice, with its endearing little stammer, grew to Gavan nearer and dearer than all the voices of the world. At first it appealed, and then it possessed him. He had thought that what he felt for her was only pity. He had thought himself too dead to all earthly pangs for the rudimentary one of love to reach him. But when, one day, he found her weeping, alone, among her flowers, he took her into his arms and the great illusion seized him once more.

It seized him, though he knew it for illusion. He laughed at the specter of nothingness and gloried in the beauty of the rainbow moment. This human creature needed him and he her: that was, for them, the only reality; who cared for the blank background where their lives flashed and vanished? The flash was what mattered. He sprang from the dead self, as from a tomb, when he kissed her lips. Life might mean sorrow and defeat, but its tragedy was atoned for by a moment of such joy.

“Gavan, Gavan, do we love each other? Do we?” she wept.

He saw illusion and joy where her woman’s heart felt only reality and terror in the joy.

They obviously loved each other, though it was without a word of love that they found themselves in each other’s arms. Had ever two beings so lonely so needed love? Her sweet, stunned eyes were a rapture of awakening to him, and though, under all, ran the deep, buried river of knowledge, whispering forever, “Vanity of vanities,” he was far above it in the sunlight of the upper air. He felt himself, knew himself only as the longing to look forever into her eyes, to hold her to him forever. That, on the day of awakening, seemed all that life meant.

Later on he found that more fundamental things had clutched him through the broken barriers of thought—jealousies and desires that showed him his partaking of the common life of humanity.

Gavan’s skepticism had not come face to face with a moral test as yet, and he could but contemplate curiously in himself the strong, instinctive revolt of all the man of hereditary custom and conscience from any dishonorable form of illegal love. He couldn’t justify it, but it was there, as strong as his longing for the woman.

It was not that he cared a rap, so he analyzed it, for laws or conventions: it was merely that he could not do anything that he felt as dishonorable.

He told Alice that she must leave her husband and come openly to him. They would go back to Europe; live in Italy—the land of happy outcasts from unhappy forms; there they would study and travel and make beauty grow about them. Holding her hands gently, he put it all before her with a reverent devotion that gave the proposal a matrimonial dignity.

“You know me well enough, dear Alice,” he said, “to know that you need fear none of the usual dangers in such cases. I don’t care about anything but you; I never will—ambition, country, family. Nothing outside me, or inside me, could make me fail you. All I want, or shall ever want, is to make you happy, and to be happy with you.”

But the things he put away as meaningless dreams the poor woman with the girl’s mind saw as grim realities. It was easy for Gavan to barter a mirage for the one thing he cared to have; the world was not a mirage to her, and even her love could not make it so. Her thin young nature knew only the craving to keep and not the revulsion from a hidden wrong. Every fiber in her shrank from the facing of a hostile order of things, the bearing through life of a public dishonor. It was as if it were he who purposed the worse disgrace, not she.

She wept and wept in his arms, hoping, perhaps, to weaken him by her feebleness and her abandonment, so that an open avowal of cowardice, an open appeal that he should yield to it, might be needless; but at last, since he would not speak, only stroking her hair, her hand, sharing her sorrow, she moaned out, “Oh, Gavan, I can’t, I can’t.”

He only half understood, feeling his heart freeze in the renunciation that she might demand. But when she sobbed on brokenly, “Don’t leave me. Stay with me. I can’t live without you. No one need ever know,” he understood.

Standing white and motionless, it was he now who repeated, “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.”

She wept on, incredulous, supplicating, reproachful. “You will not leave me! You will not abandon me!”

“I cannot—stay with you.”

“You win my heart—humiliate me,—see that I’m yours—only yours,—and then cast me off!”

“Don’t speak so cruelly, Alice. Cast you off? I, who only pray you to let me take you with me?”

“A target for the world!”

“Darling, poor darling, I know that I ask all—all; but what else is there—unless I leave you?”

She hid her face on his shoulder, sobbing miserably, her sobs her only answer, and to it he rejoined: “We can’t go on, you know that; and to stay, to deceive your husband, to drag you through all the baseness, the ugliness, the degradation, Alice, of a hidden intrigue—I can’t do that; it’s the only thing I can’t do for you.”

“You despise me; you think me wicked—because I can’t have such horrible courage. I think what you ask is more wicked; I think it hurts everybody more; I think that it would degrade us more. People can’t live like that—cut off from everything—and not be degraded in the end.”

It was a new species of torture that now tore at Gavan’s heart and mind. He saw too clearly the force of the arguments that underlay her specious appeal—more clearly, far, than she could see. It was horribly true that the life of happy outlawry he proposed might wither and debase more than a conscious sin. The organized, crafty wisdom of life was on her side. And on his was a mere matter of taste. He could find no sanction for his resistance to her and to himself except in that instinctive recoil from what he felt as dishonor. He was sacrificing them both to a silly, subjective figment. The lurid realization, that burned and froze, went through him, and with it the unanswerable necessity. He must, he must, sacrifice them. And he must talk the language of right and wrong as though he believed in it. He acted as if he did, yet nothing was further from him than such belief; that was the strange agony that wrenched his brain as he said: “You are blind, not wicked. Some day you will thank me if I make it possible for you to let me go.” And, he too incredulous, he cried, “Alice, Alice, will you really let me go without you?”

She would not consent to the final alternative, and the struggle lasted for a week, through their daily meetings—the dream-like, deft meetings under the eyes of others,—and while they rode alone over the hills—long, sad rides, when both, often in a moody silence, showed at once their hope and their resistance.

Her fear won at last. “And I can’t even pretend that it’s goodness,” she said, her voice trembling with self-scorn. “You’ve abased me to the dust, Gavan. Yes, it’s true, if you like—my fear is greater than my love.” Irony, a half-felt anger, helped her to bear the blow, for, to the end, she could not believe that he would find strength to leave her.

The parting came suddenly. Wringing her hands, looking hard into her face, where he saw still a fawning hope and a half-stupefied despair, he left her, and felt that he had torn his heart up by the very roots.

And he had sacrificed her and himself, to what? Gavan could ask himself the question at leisure during the following year.

Yet, from the irrational sacrifice was born a timid, trembling trust, a dim hope that the unbannered combat had not been in vain, that even the blind holding to the ambiguous right might blossom in a better life for her than if he had taken the joy held out to him. The trust was as irrational as the sacrifice, but it was dear to him. He cherished it, and it fluttered in him, sweet, intangible, during all the desolate year. Then, at the year’s end, he met Alice, suddenly, unexpectedly, and found her ominously changed. Her girlhood was gone. A hard, glittering surface, competent, resourceful, hid something.

The strength of his renouncement was so rooted that he felt no personal fear, and for her, too, he no longer felt fear in his nearness. What he felt was a new pity—a pity suffocating and horrible. Whispers of discreet scandal enlightened him. Alice was in no danger of what she most shrank from—a public pillory; but she was among those of whom the world whispers, with a half-condoning smile and shrug.

Gavan saw her riding one morning with a famous soldier, a Nietzschian type of strength, splendor, and high indifference. And now he understood all. He knew the man. He was one who would have stared light irony at Gavan’s chivalrous willingness to sacrifice his life to a woman; to such a charming triviality as an intrigue he would sacrifice just enough and no more. He knew the rules of the game and with him Alice was safe from any open pillory. People would never do more than whisper.

A bitter daylight flooded for Gavan that sweet, false dawn, and once again the cruelty, the caprice at the heart of all things were revealed to him. He knew the flame of impotent remorse. He had tossed the miserable child to this fate, and though remorse, like all else, was meaningless, he loathed himself for his futile, empty magnanimity.

She had seen his eyes upon her as she rode. She sent for him, and, alone with him, the glitter, the hardness, broke to dreadful despair.

She confessed all at his knees. Hardness and glitter had been the shield of the racked, terror-stricken heart. The girl was a woman and knew the use of shields.

“And Gavan, Gavan, worst of all,—far worst,—I don’t love him; I never loved him. It was simply—simply”—she could hardly speak—“that he frightened and flattered me. It was vanity—recklessness—I don’t know what it was.”

After the confession, she waited, her face hidden, for his reproach or anger. Neither came. Instead, she felt, in the long silence, that something quiet enveloped her.

She looked up to see his eyes far from her.

“Gavan, can you forgive me?” she whispered.

Once more he was looking at it all—all the cruel, the meaningless drama in which he had been enmeshed for a little while. Once more his thought had risen far above it, and the old peace, the old, dead peace, with no trembling of the hopes that meant only a deeper delusion, was regained. He knew how deep must be the reattained tranquillity, when, the woman he had loved at his feet, he felt no shrinking, no reproach, no desire, only an immense, an indifferent pity.

“Forgive you, Alice? Poor, poor Alice. Perhaps you should forgive me; but it isn’t a question of that. Don’t cry; don’t cry,” he repeated mechanically, gently stroking her hair—hair whose profuse, wonderful gold he had once kissed with a lover’s awed delight.

“You forgive me—you do forgive me, Gavan?”

“It isn’t a question of forgiveness; but of course I forgive you, dear Alice.”

“Gavan, tell me that you love me still. Can you love me? Oh, say that I haven’t lost that.”

He did not reply, looking away and lifting his hand from her hair.

The woman, leaning on his knees, felt a stealing sense of awe, worse than any fear of his anger. And worse than a vehement disavowal of love, worse than a spurning of her from him, were his words: “I want you not to suffer, dear Alice; I want you to find peace.”

“Peace! What peace can I find?”

He looked at her now, wondering if she would understand and willing to put it before her as he himself saw it: “The peace of seeing it all, and letting it all go.”

“Gavan, I swear to you that I will never see him again. Oh, Gavan, what do you mean? If you would forgive me—really forgive me—and take me now, I would follow you anywhere. I am not afraid any longer. I have found out that the only thing to be afraid of is oneself. If I have you, nothing else matters.”

He looked steadily at her, no longer touching her. “You have said what I mean. You have found it out. The only thing to be afraid of is ourselves. You will not see this man again? You will keep that promise to me?”

“Any promise! Anything you ask! And, indeed, indeed, I could not see him now,” she shuddered. “Gavan, you will take me away with you?”

He wondered at her that she did not see how far he was from her—how far, and yet how one with her, how merged in her through his comprehension of the essential unity that bound all life together, that made her suffering part of him, even while he looked down upon it from an almost musing height.

He felt unutterable gentleness and unutterable ruthlessness. “I don’t mean that, Alice. You won’t lose yourself by clinging to me, by clinging to what you want.”

“You don’t love me! Oh, you don’t love me! I have killed your love!” she wailed out, rising to her feet, pierced by her full realization. She stepped back from him to gaze at him with a sort of horror. “You talk as if you had become a priest.”

He appreciated what his attitude must seem to her—priestly indeed, almost sleek in its lack of personal emotion, its trite recourse to the preaching of renunciation. And, almost with a sense of humor, that he felt as hateful at such a moment, the perception came that he might serve her through the very erroneousness of her seeing of him. The sense of humor was hateful, and his skilful seizing of her suggestion had a grotesque aspect as well. Even in his weariness, he was aware that the cup of contemplation was full when it could hold its drop of realized irony.

“I think that I have become a priest, Alice,” he said. “I see everything differently. And weren’t you brought up in a religious way—to go to church, seek props, say your prayers, sacrifice yourself and live for others? Can’t you take hold of that again? It’s the only way.”

Her quick flaming was justified, he knew; one shouldn’t speak of help when one was so far away; he had exaggerated the sacerdotal note. “Oh, you despise me! It is because of that, and you are trying to hide it from me! What is religion to me, what is anything—anything in the world to me—if I have lost you, Gavan? Why are you so cruel, so horrible? I can’t understand it! I can’t bear it! Oh, I can’t! Why are our lives wrecked like this? Why did you leave me? Why have I become wicked? I was never, never meant to be wicked.” Tears, not of abasement, not of appeal, but of pure anguish ran down her face.

He was nearer to that elemental sadness and could speak with a more human tone. “You are not wicked—no more—no less—than any one. I don’t despise you. Believe me, Alice. If I hadn’t changed, this would have drawn me to you; I should have felt a deeper tenderness because you needed me more. But think of me as a priest: I have changed as much as that. And remember that what you have yourself found out is true—the only thing to be afraid of is oneself, and the only escape from fear is to—is to”—he paused, hearing the triteness of his own words and wondering with a new wonder at their truth, their gray antiquity, their ever-verdant youth—“is to renounce,” he finished.

He was standing now, ready for departure. In her eyes he saw at last the dignity of hopelessness, of an accepted doom, a pain far above panic.

“Dear Alice,” he said, taking her hand—“dear Alice.” And, with all the delicacy of his shrinking from a too great directness, his eyes had a steadiness of demand that sank into the poor woman’s tossed, unstable soul, he added, “Don’t ever do anything ugly—or foolish—again.”

Her lover lost,—the very slightness of the words “ugly,” “foolish,” told her how utterly lost,—a deep thrill of emotional exaltation went through the emptiness he left. She longed to clasp the lost lover and to sink at the knees of the priest.

“I will be good. I will renounce myself,” she said, as though it were a creed before an altar; and hurriedly she whispered, poor child, “Perhaps in heaven—we will find each other.”

Gavan often thought of that pathetic human clutch. So was the dream of an atoning heaven built. It kept its pathos, even its beauty, for him, when the whole tale ended in the world’s shrug and smile. He heard first that Alice had become an emotionally devout churchwoman;—that lasted for a year;—and then, alas! alas!—but, after all, the smile and shrug was the best philosophy,—that she rode once more with the Nietzschian lover. He had one short note from her: he would have heard—perhaps, at any rate, he would know what to think when he did hear that she saw the man again. And she wanted him to know from her that it was not as he might think: she really loved him now—the other; not as she had loved Gavan,—that would always be first,—but very much; and she needed love, she must have it in her life, and she was lifting this man who loved her, was helping his life, and she had broader views now and did not believe in creeds or in the shibboleths that guided the vulgar. And she was harming no one, no one knew. Life was far too complicated, the intricacies of modern civilization far too enmeshing, for duty to be seen in plain black and white. The whole question of marriage was an open one, and one had a right to interpret one’s duty according to one’s own lights. Gavan saw the hand of the new master through it all. Shortly after, the death of Alice’s husband, killed while tiger-shooting, set her free, and the new master proved himself at all events a fond one by promptly marrying her. So ended Alice in his life.

There was not much more to look back on after that. His return to England; his entering the political arena, with neither desire nor reluctance; his standing for the town his uncle’s influence marked out for him; the fight and the very gallant failure,—there had been, for him, an amused interest in the game of it all. The last year he had spent in his Surrey home, usually in company with a really pathetic effigy of the past—his father, poor and broken in health, the old serpent of Gavan’s childhood basking now in torpid insignificance, its fangs drawn.

People probably thought that he had been soured by an initial defeat. Gavan knew that the game had merely ceased to amuse him. What amused him most was concentrated and accurate scholarship. He was writing a book on some of the obscurer phases of religious enthusiasm, studying from a historical and psychological point of view the origin and formation of queer little sects,—failures in the struggle for survival,—their brief, ambiguous triumphs and their disintegrations.

His unruffled stepping-back from the arena of political activity was to the more congenial activity of understanding and observation. But there burned in him none of the observer’s, the thinker’s passion. He worked as he rode or ate his breakfast. Work was part of the necessary fuel that kept life’s flame bright. While he lived he didn’t want a feeble, flickering flame. But at his heart, he was profoundly indifferent to work, as to all else.

GAVAN’S mind, as he leaned back in the railway carriage, had passed over the visual aspect of this long retrospect, not in meditation, but in a passive seeing of its scenes and faces. Eppie’s face, fading in the mist; Robbie, silhouetted on the sky; the sulky Grainger; his uncle; his mother, and the vision of the spring day where he had wandered in the old dream of pain and into its cessation; finally, Alice, her pale hair and wistful eyes and her look when, at parting, she had said that they might be together in heaven.

He had rarely known a greater lucidity than in those swift, lonely hours of night. It was like a queer, long pause between a past accomplished and a future not yet begun—as though one should sunder time and stand between its cloven waves. The figures crossed the stage, and he seemed to see them all in the infinite leisure of an eternal moment.

This future, its figures just about to emerge from the wings into full view, slightly troubled his reverie. It was at dawn that his mind again turned to it with a conjecture half amused and half reluctant. There was something disturbing in the linkage he must make between that child’s face on the mist and the Miss Gifford he was so soon to see. That she would, at all events in her own conception, dominate the stage, he felt sure; she might even expect a special attention from a spectator whose memory could join hers in that far first act. He was pretty sure that his memory would have to do service for both; and quite sure that memory would not hold for her, as it did for him, a distinct tincture of pain, of restlessness, as though there strove in it something shackled and unfulfilled.

One’s thoughts, at four o’clock in the morning, after hours of sleeplessness, became fantastic, and Gavan found himself watching, with some shrinking, this image of the past, suddenly released, brought gasping and half stupefied to the air, to freedom, to new, strong activity, after having been, for so long, bound and gagged and thrust into an underground prison.

He turned to a forecast of what Eppie would probably be like. He had heard a good deal about her, and he had not cared for what he had heard. The fact that one did hear a good deal was not pleasing. Every one, in describing her, used the word charming; he had gathered that it meant, as applied to her, more than mere prettiness, wit, or social deftness; and it was precisely for the more that it meant that he did not care.

Apparently what really distinguished her was her energy. She traveled with her cousin, Lady Alicia Waring, a worldly, kindly dabbler in art and politics; she rushed from country-house to country-house; she worked in the slums; she sat on committees; she canvassed for parliamentary friends; she hunted, she yachted, she sang, she broke hearts, and, by all accounts, had high and resolute matrimonial ambitions. Would Eppie Gifford “get” So-and-so was a question that Gavan had heard more than once repeated, with the graceless terseness of our modern colloquialism, and it spoke much for Eppie’s popularity that it was usually asked in sympathy.

This reputation for a direct and vigorous worldliness was only thrown into more pungent relief by the startling tale of her love-affair. She had fallen in love, helplessly in love, with an impecunious younger son, an officer in the Guards—a lazy, lovable, petulant nobody, the last type one would have expected her to lose her head over. He was not stupid, but he didn’t count and never would. The match would have been a reckless one, for Eppie had, practically, only enough to pay for her clothes and her traveling expenses. The handsome guardsman had not even prospects. Yet, deliberately sacrificing all her chances, she had fallen in love, been radiantly engaged, and then, from the radiance, flung into stupefying humiliation. He had thrown her over, quite openly, for an ugly little heiress from Liverpool. Poor Eppie had carried off her broken heart—and she didn’t deny that it was broken—for a year or so of travel. This had happened four years ago. She had mended as bravely as possible,—it wasn’t a deep break after all,—and on the thrilling occasion of her first meeting with the faithless lover and his bride was magnificently sweet and regal to the ugly heiress. It was surmised that the husband was as uncomfortable as he deserved to be. But this capacity for recklessness, this picture of one so dauntless, dazed and discomfited, hardly redeemed the other, the probably fundamental aspect. She had lost her head; but that didn’t prove that when she had it she would not make the best possible use of it. There was talk now—Eppie’s was the publicity of popularity—of Gavan’s old-time rival, Grainger, who had inherited an immense fortune and, unvarnished and defiantly undecorative on his lustrous background, was one of the world’s prizes. All that he had was at Eppie’s feet, and some more brilliant alternative could be the only cause for hesitation in a young woman seared by misfortune and cured forever of folly.

So the talk went, and Gavan took such gabble with a large pinch of ironic incredulity; but at the same time the gossip left its trail. The impetuous and devastating young lady, with her assurance and her aim at large successes, was to him a distasteful figure. There was pain in linking it with little Eppie. It stood waiting in the wings and was altogether novel and a little menacing to one’s peace of mind. He really did not want to see Miss Gilford; she belonged to a modern type intensely wearisome to him. But she was staying with her uncle and aunt—only Miss Barbara was left—at Kirklands, and the general, after a meeting in London, had written begging him to pay them all a visit, and, since there had seemed no reason for not going, here he was.

Here he was, and round the corner of the wing the new Eppie stood waiting. Poor little Eppie of childhood—she was lost forever.

But all the clearness of the night concentrated, at dawn, into that vivid memory of the past where they had wandered together, sharing joy and sorrow.

That was long, long over. To-morrow was already here, and to-morrow belonged to the new Eppie.

III

AVAN spent the morning in Edinburgh, seeing an old relative, and reached Kirklands at six.

It was a cold October evening, the moors like a dark, sullenly heaving ocean and a heavy bar of sunset lying along the horizon.

The windows of the old white house mirrored the dying color, and here and there the inner light of fire and candle seemed like laughter on a grave face. With all its loneliness it was a happy-looking house; he remembered that; and in the stillness of the vast moors and the coming night it made him think of a warmly throbbing heart filling with courage and significance a desolate life.

The general came from the long oak library, book in hand, to welcome him. Gavan was almost automatically observant of physical processes and noted now the pronounced limp, the touch of garrulity—symptoms of the fine old organism’s placid disintegration. Life was leaving it unreluctantly, and the mild indifference of age made his cordiality at once warmer and more impersonal than of old.

As he led Gavan to his room, the room of boyhood, near Eppie’s, overlooking the garden and the wooded hills, he told him that Eppie and Miss Barbara were dressing and that he would have time for a talk with them before dinner at eight.

“It’s changed since you were here, Gavan. Ah! time goes—it goes. Poor Rachel! we lost her five years ago. If Eppie didn’t look after us so well we should be lonely, Barbara and I. We seldom get away now. Too old to care for change. But Eppie always gives us three or four months, and a letter once a week while she’s away. She puts us first. This is home, she says. She sees clever people at Alicia Waring’s, has the world at her feet,—you’ve heard, no doubt,—but she loves Kirklands best. She gardens with me—a great gardener Eppie, but she is good at anything she sets herself to; she drives her aunt about, she reads to us and sings to us,—you have heard of her singing, too,—keeps us in touch with life. Eppie is a wonderful person for sharing happiness,” the general monologued, looking about the fire-lit room; and Gavan felt that, from this point of view, some of the little Eppie might still have survived.

“So you have given up the idea of the House?” the general went on.

“I’m no good at it,” said Gavan; “I’ve proved it.”

“Proved it? Nonsense. Wait till you are fifty before saying that. Why, you’ve everything in your favor. You weren’t enough in earnest; that was the trouble. You didn’t care enough; you played into your opponents’ hands. The British public doesn’t understand idealism or irony. Eppie told us all about it.”

“Eppie? How did Eppie know?” He found himself using her little name as a matter of course.

“She knows everything,” the general rejoined, with his air of happy, derived complacency; “even when she’s not in England, she never loses touch. Eppie is very much behind the scenes.”

The simile recalled to Gavan his own vision of the stage and the waiting figure. “Even behind my scenes!” he ejaculated, smiling at so much omniscience.

“From the moment you came into public life, yes.”

“And she knows why I failed at it? Idealism and irony?”

“That’s what she says; and I usually find Eppie right.” The general, after the half-humorous declaration, had a pause, and before leaving his guest, he added, “Right, except about her own affairs. She is a child there yet.”

Eppie’s disaster must have been keenly felt and keenly resented at Kirklands. The general made no further reference to it and Gavan asked no question.

There was a fire, a lamp, and several clusters of candles in the long, dark library when Gavan entered it an hour later, so that the darkness was full of light; yet he had wandered slowly down its length, looking about him at the faded tan, russet, and gilt of well-remembered books, at the massive chairs and tables, all in their old places, all so intimately familiar, before seeing that he was not alone in the room.

Some one in white was sitting, half submerged in a deep chair, behind the table with its lamp—some one who had been watching him as he wandered, and who now rose to meet him, taking him so unawares that she startled him, all the light in the dim room seeming suddenly to center upon her and she herself to throw everything, even his former thoughts of her, into the background.

It was Eppie, of course, and all that he had heard of her, all that he had conjectured, fell back before the impression that held him in a moment, long, really dazzled, yet very acute.

Her face was narrow, pale, faintly freckled; the jaw long, the nose high-bridged, the lips a little prominent; and, as he now saw, a clear flush sprang easily to her cheeks. Eyes, lips, and hair were vivid with color: the hair, with its remembered rivulets of russet and gold, piled high on her head, framing the narrow face and the long throat; the eyes gray or green or gold, like the depths of a mountain stream.

He had heard many analogies for the haunting and fugitive charm of Miss Gifford’s face—a charm that could only, apparently, be caught with the subtleties of antithesis. One appreciator had said that she was like an angelic jockey; another, that with a statesman’s gaze she had a baby’s smile; another, that she was a Flying Victory done by Velasquez. And with his own dominant impression of strength, sweetness, and daring, there crowded other similes. Her eyes had the steeplechaser’s hard, smiling scrutiny of the next jump; the halloo of the hunt under a morning sky was in them, the joyous shouts of Spartan boys at play; yet, though eyes of heroism and laughter, they were eyes sad and almost tragically benignant.

She was tall, with the spare lightness of a runner poised for a race, and the firm, ample breast of a hardy nymph. She suggested these pagan, outdoor similes while, at the same time, luxuriously feminine in her more than fashionable aspect, the last touches of modernity were upon her: her dress, the eighteenth-century, interpreted by Paris, her decorations all discretion and distinction—a knot of silver-green at her breast, an emerald ring on her finger, and emerald earrings, two drops of smooth, green light, trembling in the shadows of her hair.

Altogether Gavan was able to grasp the impression even further, to simplify it, to express at once its dazzled quality and its acuteness, as various and almost violent, as if, suddenly, every instrument in an orchestra were to strike one long, clear, vibrating note.

His gaze had been prolonged, and hers had answered it with as open an intentness. And it was at last she who took both his hands, shook them a little, holding them while, not shyly, but with that vivid flush on her cheek, “You,” she said.

For she was startled, too. It was he. She remembered, as if she had seen them yesterday, his air of quick response, surface-shrinking, deep composure, the old delicious smile, and the glance swiftly looking and swiftly averted.

“And you,” Gavan repeated. “I haven’t changed so much, though,” he said.

“And I have? Really much? Long skirts and turned up hair are a transformation. It’s wonderful to see you, Gavan. It makes one get hold of the past and of oneself in it.”

“Does it?”

“Doesn’t it?” She let go his hands, and moving to the fire and standing before it while she surveyed him, she went on, not waiting for an answer:

“But I don’t suppose that you have my keenness of memory. It all rushes back—our walks, our games, our lessons, the smell of the heather, the very taste of the heather-honey we ate at tea, and all the things you did and said and looked; your building the Petit Trianon, and your playing dolls with me that day; your Agnes, in her pink dress, and my Elspeth, whom I used to whip so.”

“I remember it all,” said Gavan, “and I remember how I broke poor Elspeth.”

“Do you?”

“All of it: the attic windows and the pine-tree under them, and the great white bird, and the dreadful, soft little thud on the garden path.”

“Yes, I can see your face looking down. You were quite silent and frozen. I screamed and screamed. Aunt Barbara thought that you had fallen at first from the way I screamed.”

“Poor little Eppie. Yes, I remember; it was horrid.”

Their eyes, smiling, quizzical, yet sad, watched, measured each other, while they exchanged these trophies from the past. He had joined her beside the fire, and, turning, she leaned her hands on the mantel and looked into the flames. So looking, her face had its aspect of almost tragic brooding. It was as if, Gavan thought, under the light memories, all those visions of his night were there before her, as if, astonishingly, and in almost uncanny measure, she shared them.

“And do you remember Robbie?” she asked presently.

“I was just thinking of Robbie,” Gavan answered. It was her face that had brought back the old sorrow, and that memory, more than any, linked them over all that was new and strange. They glanced at each other.

“I am so glad,” said Eppie.

“Because I remember?”

“Yes, that you haven’t forgotten. You said you would.”

“Did I?” he asked, though he quite remembered that, too.

“Yes; and I should have felt Robbie more dead if you had forgotten him.”

This was wonderfully not the Miss Gifford, and wonderfully the old Eppie. She saw that thought, too, answering it with, “Things haven’t really changed so much, have they? It’s all so very near—all of that.”

So near, that its sudden sharing was making Gavan a little uncomfortable, with the discomfort of the night before justified, intensified.

He hadn’t imagined such familiar closeness with a woman really unknown, nor that, sweeping away all the formalities that might have grown up between them, she should call him Gavan and make it natural for him to call her Eppie. He didn’t really mind. It was amusing, charming perhaps, perhaps even touching—yes, of course it was that; but she was rather out of place: much nearer than where he had imagined she would be, on the stage before him.

Passing to another memory, she now said, “I clung for years, you know, to your promise to come back.”

“I couldn’t come—really and simply could not.”

“I never for a moment thought you could, any more than I thought you could forget Robbie.”

“And when I could come, you were gone.”

“How miserable that made me! I was in Rome when I had the news from Uncle Nigel.”

He felt bound fully to exonerate the past. “I had the life, during my boyhood, of a sumptuous galley-slave. I had everything except liberty and leisure. I was put into a system and left there until it had had its will of me. And when I was free I imagined that you had forgotten all about me. To a shy, warped boy, a grown-up Eppie was an alarming idea.”

“I never thought you had forgotten me!” said Eppie, smiling.

Again she actually disturbed him; but, lightly, he replied with the truth, feeling a certain satisfaction in its lightness: “Never, never; though, of course, you fell into a background. You can’t deny that I did.”

“Oh, no, I don’t deny it.” Her smile met his, seemed placidly to perceive its meaning. She did not for a moment imply, by her admissions, any more than he did; the only question was, What did his admissions imply?

She left them there, going on in an apparent sequence, “Have you heard much about me, Gavan?”

“A good deal,” he owned.

“I ask because I want to pick up threads; I want to know how many stitches are dropped, so to speak. Since you have heard, I want to know just what; I often seem to leave reverberations behind me. Some rather ugly ones, I fear. You heard, perhaps, that I was that rather ambiguous being, the young woman of fashion, materialistic, ambitious, hard.” Her gaze, with its cool scrutiny, was now upon him.

“Those are really too ugly names for what I heard. I gathered, on the whole, that you were merely very vigorous and that you had more opportunities than most people for vigor.”

“I’m glad that you saw it so; but all the same, the truth, at times, hasn’t been beautiful. I have, often, been too indifferent toward people who didn’t count for me, and too diplomatic toward those who did. You see, Gavan,” she put it placidly before him, not at all as if drawing near in confidence,—she was much further in her confidences than in her memories,—but merely as if she unrolled a map before him so that he might clearly see where, at present, they found themselves, “you see, I am a nearly penniless girl—just enough to dress and go about. Of course if I didn’t dress and didn’t go about I could keep body and soul together; but to the shrewd eyes of the world, a girl living on her friends, making capital of her personality, while she seeks a husband who will give her the sort of place she wants—oh, yes, the world isn’t so unfair, either, when one takes off the veils. And this girl, with the personality that pays, was put early in a place from where she could see all sorts of paths at once, see the world, in its ladder aspect, before her—all the horridness of low rungs and all the satisfaction of high ones. I have been tempted through complexity of understanding; perhaps I still am. One wants the best; and when one doesn’t see clearly what the best is, one is in danger of becoming ugly. But echoes are often distorting.”

Miss Gifford was now very fully before him, as she had evidently intended to be. It was as if she herself had drawn between them the barrier of the footlights and as if, on her chosen stage, she swept a really splendid curtsey. And this frank and panoplied young woman of the world was far easier to deal with than the reminiscent Eppie. He could comfortably smile and applaud from his stall, once more the mere spectator—easiest of attitudes.

“The echoes, on the whole, were rather magnificent, as if an Amazon had galloped across mountains and left them calling her prowess from peak to peak.”

Her eyes, quickly on his, seemed to measure the conscious artificiality, to compare it with what he had already, more helplessly, shown her. He felt his rather silly deftness penetrated and that she guessed that the mountain calls had not at all enchanted him. She owned to her own acuteness in her next words:

“And you don’t like young ladies to gallop across mountains. Well, I love galloping, though I’m sorry that I leave over-loud echoes. You, at all events, are noiseless. You seem to have sailed over my head in an air-boat. It was hard for me to keep any trace of you.”

“But I don’t at all mean that I dislike Amazons to have their rides.”

“Let us talk of you now. I have had an eye on you, you know, even when you disappeared into the Indian haze; you had just disappeared when I first came to London. I only heard of lofty things—scholarly distinction, diplomatic grace, exquisite indifference to the world’s prizes and to noisy things in general. It’s all true, I can see.”

“Well, I’m not indifferent to you,” said Gavan, smiling, tossing his appropriate bouquet.

She had at this another, but a sharper, of her penetrative pauses. It was pretty to see her, rather like a deer arrested in its careless speed, suddenly wary, its head high. And, in another moment, he saw that the quick flush, almost violently, sprang to her cheek. Turning her head a little from him, she looked away, almost as if his glib acceptance of a frivolous meaning in her words abashed her—and more for him than for herself; as if she suddenly suspected him of being stupid enough to accept her at the uglier valuation of those echoes he had heard. She had not meant to say that she was one of the world’s prizes, and she had perhaps meant to say, generously, that if he found her noisy she wouldn’t resent indifference. Perhaps she had meant to say nothing of herself at all. She certainly wasn’t on the stage, and in thinking her so he felt that he had shown himself disloyal to something that she, more nobly, had taken for granted. The flush, so vivid, that stayed made him feel himself a blunderer.

But, in a moment, she went on with a lightness of allusion to his speech that yet oddly answered the last turn of his self-reproach. “Oh, you are loyal, I am sure, even to a memory. I wasn’t thinking of particulars, but of universals. My whole impression of you was of something fragrant, elusive, impalpable. I never felt that I had a glimpse of really you. It was almost gross in comparison actually to see your name in the papers, to read of your fight for Camley, to think of you in that earthly scuffle. It was like roast-beef after roses; and I was glad, because I’m gross. I like roast-beef.”

He was grateful to her for the lightness that carried him so kindly over his own blunder.

“It was only the fragrance of the roast, too, you see, since I was defeated,” he said.

“You didn’t mind a bit, did you?”

“It would sound, wouldn’t it, rather like sour grapes to say it?”

“You can say it. It was so obvious that you might have had the bunch by merely stretching out your hand—they were under it, not over your head. You simply wouldn’t play the game.” She left him now, reaching her chair with a long stride and a curving, gleaming turn of her white skirts, suggesting a graceful adaptation of some outdoor dexterity. As she leaned back in her chair, fixing him with that look of cheerful hardness, she made him think so strongly of the resolute, winning type, that almost involuntarily he said, “You would have played it, wouldn’t you?”

“I should think so! I care for the grapes, you see. It’s what I said—you didn’t care enough.”

“Well, it’s kind of you to see ineffectuality in that light.” Still examining the steeplechaser quality, he added, “You do care, don’t you, a lot?”

“Yes, a lot. I am worldly to my finger-tips.” Her eyes challenged him—gaily, not defiantly—to misunderstand her again.

“What do you mean, exactly, by worldly?” he asked.

“I mean by it that I believe in the world, that I love the world; I believe that its grapes are worth while,—and by grapes I mean the things that people strive for and that the strong attain. The higher they hang and the harder the climb, the more I like them.”

Gavan received these interpretations without comment. “A seat in the House isn’t very high, though, is it?” he remarked.

“That depends on the sitter. It might be a splendid or a trivial thing.”

“And in my case, if I’d got it, what would it have been? Can you see that, too, you very clear-sighted young woman?”

He stood above her, smiling, but now without suavity or artificiality; looking at her as though she were a pretty gipsy whose palm he had crossed with silver. And Eppie answered, quite like a good-natured gipsy, conscious of an admiring but skeptical questioner, “I think it would have been neither.”

“But what then? What would this sitter have made of it?”

“A distraction? An experiment upon himself? I’m sure I don’t know. Indeed, I don’t pretend to know you at all yet. Perhaps I will in time.”

Once more he was conscious of the discomfort, slight and stealing, as though the gipsy knew too much already. But he protested, and with sincerity: “If there is anything to find you will certainly find it. I hope that you will find it worth your while. I hope that we shall be great friends.”

She smiled up at him, clearly and quietly: “I have always been your great friend.”

“Always? All this while?”

“All this while. Never mind if you haven’t felt it; I have. I will do for both.”

Her smile, her look, made him finally and completely understand the application of the well-worn word to her. She was charming. She could be lavish, pour out unasked bounty upon one, and yet, in no way undervaluing it, be full of delicacy, of humor, in her generosity.

“I thought I hadn’t any right to feel it,” said Gavan. “I thought you would not have remembered.”

“Well, you will find out—I always remember, it’s my strong point,” said Eppie.

IV

EXT morning at breakfast he had quite a new impression of her.

Pale sunlight flooded the square, white room where, in all its dignified complexity of appurtenance, the simple meal was laid out. From the windows one saw the clear sky, the moor, its summer purple turned to rich browns and golds, and, nearer, the griffins with their shields.

Eppie was a little late in coming, and Gavan, while he and the general finished their wandering consumption of porridge and sat down to bacon and eggs, had time to observe by daylight in Miss Barbara, behind her high silver urn, the changes that in her were even more emphatic than in her brother. She was sweeter than ever, more appealing, more affirmative, with all manner of futile, fluttering little gestures and gentle, half-inarticulate little ejaculations of pleasure, approbation, or distress. Her smile, rather silly, worked too continually, as though moved by slackened wires. Her hands defined, described, ejaculated; over-expression had become automatic with her.

Eppie, when she appeared, said that she had had a walk, stooping to kiss her aunt and giving Gavan a firm, chill hand on her way to the same office for the general. She took her seat opposite Gavan, whistling an Irish-terrier to her from the door and, before she began to eat, dropping large fragments of bannock into his mouth. Her loose, frieze clothes smelled of peat and sunshine; her hair seemed to have the sparkle of the dew on it; she suggested mountain tarns, skylarks, morning gladness: but, with all this, Gavan, for the first time, now that she faced the hard, high light, saw how deeply, too, she suggested sadness.

Her face had moments of looking older than his own. It was fresh, it was young, but it had lived a great deal, and felt things to the bone, as it were.

There were little wrinkles about her eyes; her white brow, under its sweep of hair, was faintly lined; the oval of her cheek, long and fine, took, at certain angles, an almost haggard sharpness. It was not a faded face, nor a face to wither with years: every line of it spoke of a permanent beauty; but, with all the color that the chill morning air had brought into it, it yet made one think of bleak uplands, of weather-beaten cliffs. Life had engraved it with ineffaceable symbols. Storms had left their mark, bitter conflicts and bitter endurances.

While she ate, with great appetite, she talked incessantly, to the general, to Miss Barbara, to Gavan, but not so much to him, tossing, in the intervals of her knife and fork and cup, bits of food to the attentive terrier. He saw why the old people adored her. She was the light, the movement of their monotonous days. Not only did she bring them her life: it was their own that she vivified with her interest. The interest was not assumed, dutiful. There was no touch of the conscious being kind. She questioned as eagerly as she told. She knew and cared for every inch of the country, every individual in the country-side. She was full of sagacity and suggestion, full of anecdote and a nipping Scotch humor. And one felt strongly in her the quality of old race. Experience was in her blood, an inheritance of instinct, and, that so significant symptom, the power of playfulness—the intellectual detachment that, toward firm convictions, could afford a lightness scandalous to more crudely compacted natures, could afford gaieties and audacities, like the flights of a bird tethered by an invisible thread to a strong hand.

Miss Barbara, plaintively repining over village delinquencies, was lured to see comedy lurking in the cases of insubordination and thriftlessness, though at the mention of Archie MacHendrie, the local drunkard and wife-beater, Eppie’s brow grew black—with a blackness beside which Miss Barbara’s gloom was pallid. Eppie said that she wished some one would give Archie a thrashing, and Gavan could almost see her doing it herself.

From local topics she followed the general to politics, while he glanced down the columns of the “Scotsman,” so absorbed and so vehement that, meeting at last Gavan’s meditative eye, she seemed to become aware of an irony he had not at all intended, and said, “A crackling of thorns under a pot, all this, Gavan thinks, and, what does it all matter? You have become a philosopher, Gavan; I can see that.”

“Well, my dear, from Plato down philosophers have thought that politics did matter,” said the general, incredulous of indifference to such a topic.

“Unless they were of a school that thought that nothing did,” said Eppie.

“Gavan’s not of that weak-kneed persuasion.”

“Oh, he isn’t weak-kneed!” laughed Eppie.

She drove her aunt all morning in the little pony-cart and wrote letters after lunch, Gavan being left to the general’s care. It was not until later that she assumed toward him the more personal offices of deputy hostess, meeting him in the hall as she emerged from the morning-room, her thick sheaf of letters in her hand, and proposing a walk before tea. She took him up the well-remembered path beside the burn; but now, in the clear autumnal afternoon, he seemed further from her than last night before the fire. Already he had seen that the sense of nearness or distance depended on her will rather than his own; so that it was now she who chose to talk of trivial things, not referring by word or look to the old memories, deepest of all, that crowded about him on the hilltop, not even when, breasting the wind, they passed the solitary group of pine-trees, where she had so deeply shared his suffering, so wonderfully comprehended his fears.

She strode against the twisted flappings of her skirt, tawny strands of hair whipping across her throat, her hands deeply thrust into her pockets, her head unbowed before the enormous buffets of the wind, and he felt anew the hardy energy that would make tender, lingering touches upon the notes of the past rare things with her.

In the uproar of air, any sequence of talk was difficult. Her clear voice seemed to shout to him, like the cold shocks of a mountain stream leaping from ledge to ledge, and the trivial things she said were like the tossing of spray upon that current of deep, joyful energy.

“Isn’t it splendid!” she exclaimed at last. They had walked two miles along the crest of the hill, and, smiling in looking round at him, her face, all the sky behind it, all the wind around it, made the word match his own appreciation.

“Splendid,” he assented, thinking of her glance and poise.

Still bending her smile upon him, she said, “You already look different.”

“Different from what?” he asked, amused by her expression, as of a kindly, diagnosing young doctor.

“From last night. From what I felt of you. One might have thought that you had lost the capacity for feeling splendor.”

“Why should you have imagined me so deadened?” He kept his cheerful curiosity.

“I don’t know. I did. There,”—she paused to point,—“do you remember the wind-mill, Gavan? The old miller is dead and his son is the miller now; but the mill looks just as it did when we were little. It makes one think of birds and ships, doesn’t it?—with the beauty that it stays and doesn’t pass. When I was a child—did I ever confide it to you?—my dream was to catch one of the sails as it came down and let it carry me up, up, and right around. What fun it would have been! I suppose that one could have held on.”

“In pretty grim earnest, after the first fun.”

“It would be the sense of coming grimness that would make the desperate thrill of it.”

“You are fond of thrills and perils.”

“Not fond, exactly; the love of risk is a deeper thing—something fundamental in us, I suppose.”

She had walked on, down the hillside, where gorse bushes pulled at her skirts, and he was putting together last night’s impressions with to-day’s, and thinking that if she embodied the instinctive, the life-loving, it wasn’t in the simple, unreflecting forms that the words usually implied. She was simple, but not in the least guileless, and her directness was a choice among recognized complexities. It was no spontaneous child of nature who, on the quieter hillside, where they could talk, talked of India, now, of his life there, the people he had known, many of whom she too knew. He knew that he was being managed, being made to talk of what she wanted to hear, that she was still engaged in penetrating. He was quite willing to be managed, penetrated,—for as far as she could get; he could rely on his own deftness in retreat before too deep a probe, though, should she discover that for him the lessons of life had resulted in an outlook perhaps the antipodes from her own, he guessed that her own would show no wavering. Still, she should run, if possible, no such risk. They were to be friends, good friends: that was, as she had said, not only an accomplished, but a long-accomplished fact; but, even more than in childhood, she would be a friend held at arm’s-length.

Meanwhile, unconscious, no doubt, of these barriers, Eppie walked beside him and made him talk about himself. She knew, of course, of his mother’s death; she did not speak of that: many barriers were her own—she was capable of most delicate avoidances. But she asked after his father. “He is still alive, I hear.”

“Yes, indeed, and gives me a good deal of his company.”

“Oh.” She was a little at a loss. He could guess at what she had heard of his father. He went on, though choosing his words in a way that showed a slight wincing behind his wish to be very frank and friendly with her, for even yet his father made him wince, standing, as he did, for the tragedy of his mother’s life: “He is very much alive for a person so gone to pieces. But I can put up with him far more comfortably than when he was less pitiable.”

“How much do you have to put up with him?” she asked, trying to image, as he saw, his ménage in Surrey, in the house he had just been describing to her, its old bricks all vague pinks and mauves, its high-walled gardens clustering near it, its wonderful hedges, that, he said, it ruined him to keep up to their reputation of exquisite formality; and, within, its vast library—all the house a brain, practically, the other rooms like mere places for life’s renewal before centering in the intellectual workshop. She evidently found it difficult to place, among the hedges, the lawns, the long walls of the library, a father, gone to pieces perhaps, but displaying all the more helplessly his general unworthiness. Even in lenient circles, Captain Palairet was thought to have an undignified record.

“Oh, he is there for most of the time. He is there now,” said Gavan, without pathos. “He has no money left, and now that I’ve a little I’m the obvious thing to retire to.”

“I hope that it’s not very horrid for you.”

“I can’t say that it’s horrid at all. I don’t see much of him, and, in many respects, he has remained, for the onlooker, rather a charming creature. He gives me very little trouble—smokes, eats, plays billiards. When we meet, we are very affable.”

Eppie did not say, “You tolerate him because he is piteous,” but he imagined that she guessed it.

V

E was awakened early next morning by the sound of singing in the garden below.

His windows were widely opened and a cold, pure air filled the room. He lay dreamily listening for some moments before recognizing Eppie’s voice—recognizing it, though he had never heard her sing.

Fresh and strong, it put a new vitality into the simple sadness of an old Scotch ballad, as though in the very sorrow it found joy. It was not an emotional voice. Clearly and firmly it sounded, and seemed a part of the frosty, sunny morning, part of the sky that was like a great chalice filled with light, of the whitened hills, the aromatic pine-woods, and the distant, rushing burn. He had sprung up after the first dreamy listening and looked out at it all, and at her walking through the garden, her dog at her heels. She went out by the little gate sunken deep in the wall, and disappeared in the woods; and still the voice reached him, singing on, and at each repetition of the monotonous, departing melody, a sadder, sweeter sense of pain strove in his heart.

He listened, looking down at the pine-tree beneath the window, at the garden, the summer-house, the withered tangle of the rose upon the wall, and up at the hilltop, at the crystalline sky; and such a sudden pang of recollection pierced him that tears came to his eyes.

What was it that he remembered? or, rather, what did he not? Things deep and things trivial, idle smiles, wrenching despairs, youth, sorrow, laughter,—all the past was in the pang, all the future, too, it seemed, and he could not have said whether his mother, Alice, Eppie with her dolls, and little Robbie, or the clairvoyant intuition of a future waiting for him here—whether presage or remembrance—were its greater part.

Not until the voice had died, in faintest filaments of sound, far away among the woods, did the pain fade, leaving him shaken. Such moods were like dead things starting to life, and reminded him too vividly of the fact that as long as one was alive, one was, indeed, in danger from life; and though his thought was soon able to disentangle itself from the knot of awakened emotions that had entwined it for a moment, a vague sense of fear remained with him. Something had been demanded of him—something that he had, involuntarily, found himself giving. This it was to have still a young nature, sensitive to impressions. He understood. Yet it was with a slight, a foolishly boyish reluctance, as he told himself, that he went down some hours later to meet Eppie at breakfast.

There was an unlooked-for refuge for him when he found her hardly noticing him, and very angry over some village misdemeanor. The anger held her far away. She dilated on the subject all during breakfast, pouring forth her wrath, without excitement, but with a steady vehemence. It was an affair of a public-house, and Eppie accused the publican of enticing his clients to drink, of corrupting the village sobriety, and she urged the general, as local magistrate, to take immediate action, showing a very minute knowledge of the technicalities of the case.

“My dear,” the general expostulated, “indeed I don’t think that the man has done anything illegal; we are powerless about the license in such a case. You must get more evidence.”

“I have any amount of evidence. The man is a public nuisance. Poor Mrs. MacHendrie was crying to me about it this morning. Archie is hardly ever sober now. I shall drive over to Carlowrie and see Sir Alec about it; as the wretch’s landlord he can make it uncomfortable for him, and I’ll see that he makes it as uncomfortable as possible.”

Laughingly, but slightly harassed, the general said: “You see, we have a tyrant here. Eppie is really a bit too hard on the man. He is an unpleasant fellow, I own, a most unpleasant manner—a beast, if you will, but a legal beast.”

“The most unpleasant form of animal, isn’t it? It’s very good of Eppie to care so much,” said Gavan.

“You don’t care, I suppose,” she said, turning her eyes on him, as though she saw him for the first time that morning.

“I should feel more hopeless about it, perhaps.”

“Why, pray?”

“At all events, I shouldn’t be able to feel so much righteous indignation.”

“Why not?”

“He is pretty much of a product, isn’t he?—not worse, I suppose, than the men whose weakness enriches him. It’s a pity, of course, that one can’t painlessly pinch such people out of existence, as one would offensive insects.”

Eppie, across the table, eyed him, her anger quieted. “He is a product of a good many things,” she said, now in her most reasonable manner, “and he is going to be a product of some more before I’m done with him,—a product of my hatred for him and his kind, for one thing. That will be a new factor in his development. Gavan,” she smiled, “you and I are going to quarrel.”

“Dear Eppie!” Miss Barbara interposed. “Gavan, you must not take her seriously; she so often says extravagant things just to tease one.” Really dismayed, alternately nodding and shaking her head in reassurance and protest, she looked from one to the other. “And don’t, dear, say such unchristian things of anybody. She is not so hard and unforgiving as she sounds, Gavan.”

“Aunt Barbara! Aunt Barbara!” laughed Eppie, leaning her elbows on the table, her eyes still on Gavan, “my hatred for Macdougall isn’t nearly as unchristian as Gavan’s indifference. I don’t want to pinch him painlessly out of life at all. I think that life has room for us both. I want to have him whipped, or made uncomfortable in some way, until he becomes less horrid.”

“Whipped, dear! People are never whipped nowadays! It was a very barbarous punishment indeed, and, thank God, we have outgrown it. We will outgrow it all some day. And as to any punishment, I don’t know, I really don’t. Resist not evil,” Miss Barbara finished in a vague, helpless murmur, uncertain as to what course would at once best apply to Macdougall’s case and satisfy the needs of public sobriety.

“Perhaps one owes it to people to resist them,” Eppie answered.

“Oh, Eppie dear, if only you cared a little more for Maeterlinck!” sighed Miss Barbara, the more complex readings of whose later years had been somewhat incongruously adapted to her early simple faiths. “Do you remember that beautiful thing he says,—and Gavan’s attitude reminds me of it,—‘Le sage qui passe interrompt mille drâmes’?”

“You will be quoting Tolstoi to me next, Aunt Barbara. I suspect that such sages would interrupt a good deal more than dramas.”

“I hope that you care for Tolstoi, Gavan,” said Miss Barbara, not forgetful of his boyish pieties. “Not the novels,—they are very, very sad, and so long, and the characters have such a number of names it is most confusing,—but the dear little books on religion. It is all there: love of all men, and non-resistance of evil, and self-renunciation.”

“Yes,” Gavan assented, while Eppie looked rather gravely at him.

“How beautiful this world would be if we could see it so—no hatred, no strife, no evil.”

Again Gavan assented with, “None.”

“None; and no life either,” Eppie finished for them.

She rose, thrusting her hands into alternate pockets looking for a note-book, which she found and consulted. “I’m off for the fray, Uncle Nigel, for hatred and strife. You and Gavan are going to shoot, so I’ll bring you your lunch at the corner of the Carlowrie woods.”

“So that you and Gavan may continue your quarrel there. Very well. I prefer listening.”

“Gavan understands that Eppie must not be taken seriously,” Miss Barbara interposed; but Eppie rejoined, drawing on her gloves, “Indeed, I intend to be taken seriously. I quarrel with people I like as well as with those I hate.”

“You are going to be a factor in my development, too?” said Gavan.

“Of course, as you are in mine, as we all are in one another’s. We can’t help that. And my attack on you shall be conscious.”

These open threats didn’t at all alarm him. It was what was unconscious in her that stirred disquiet.

When Eppie had departed and the general had gone off to see to preparations for the morning’s shoot, Miss Barbara, still sitting rather wistfully behind her urn, said: “I hope, dear Gavan, that you will be able to influence Eppie a little. I am so thankful to find you unchanged about all the deeper things of life. You could help her, I am sure. She needs guidance. She is so loving, so clever, a joy to Nigel and to me; but she is very headstrong, very reckless and wilful,—a will in subjection to nothing but her own sense of right. It’s not that she is altogether irreligious,—thank Heaven for that,—but she hasn’t any of the happiness of religion. There is no happiness, is there, Gavan—I feel sure that you see it as I do,—but in having our lives stayed on the Eternal?”

Gavan, as it was very easy to do, assented again.

He spent the morning with the general in shooting over the rather scant covers, and at two, in a sheltered bend of the woods, where the sunlight lay still and bright, Eppie joined them, bringing the lunch-basket in her dog-cart.

She was in a very good humor, and while, sitting above them, she dispensed rations, announced to her uncle the result of her visit to Sir Alec.

“He thinks he can turn him out if any flagrant ease of drunkenness occurs again. We talked over the conditions of his lease.”

“Carston, I am sure, doesn’t care a snap of his fingers about it.”

“Of course not; but he cares that I care.”

“You see, Gavan, by what strings the world is pulled. Carston hasn’t two ideas in his head.”

“Luckily I am here to use his empty head to advantage. I wheedled Lady Carston, too,—the bad influence Macdougall had on church-going. Lady Carston’s one idea, Gavan, is the keeping of the Sabbath. Altogether it was an excellent morning’s work.” Eppie was cheerful and triumphant. She was eating from a plate on her knees and drinking milk out of a little silver cup. “Do you think me a tiresome, managing busybody, Gavan?” She smiled down at him, and her lashes catching the sunlight, an odd, misty glitter half veiled her eyes. “You look,” she added, “as you used to look when you were a little boy. The years collapsed just then.”

He was conscious that, under her sudden glance, he had, indeed, looked shy. It was not her light question, but the strange depth of her half-closed eyes.

“I find a great deal of the old Eppie in you: I remember that you used to want to bully the village people for their good.”

“I’m still a bully, I think, but a more discreet one. Won’t you have some milk, Gavan? You used to love milk when you were a little boy. Have you outgrown that?”

“Not at all. I should still love some; but don’t rob yourself.”

“There ‘s heaps here. I’ve no spare glass. Do you mind?” She held out to him the silver cup, turning its untouched edge to him, something maternal in the gesture, in the down-looking of her sun-dazed eyes.

He felt himself foolishly flushing while he drank the milk; and when, really seized by a silly childish shyness, he protested that he wanted no more, she placidly, with an emphasizing of her air of sweet, comprehending authority, said, “Oh, but you must; it holds almost nothing.”

For the second time that day, as he obediently took from her hand the innocent little cup, Gavan had the unreasoning impulse of tears.

The sunny afternoon was silent. Overhead, the sky had its chalice look, clear, benignant, brimmed with light. The general, the lolling dogs, were part of the background, with the heather and the wood of larches, the finely falling sprays delicately blurred upon the sky.

It was again something sweet, sweet, simple and profound, that brought again that pang of presage and of pain. But the pain was like a joy, and the tears like tears of happiness in the sunny stillness, where her firm and gentle hand gave him milk in a silver cup.

The actual physical sensation of a rising saltness was an alarm signal that, with a swift reversal of mental wheels, brought a revulsion of consciousness. He saw himself threatened once more by nature’s enchantments: wily nature, luring one always back to life with looks from comrade eyes, touches from comrade fingers, pastoral drinks all seeming innocence, and embracing sunlight. Wily Circe. With a long breath, the mirage was seen as mirage and the moment’s dangerous blossoming withered as if dust had been strewn over it.

VI

O see his own susceptibility so plainly was, he told himself, to be safe from it; not safe from its pang, perhaps, but safe from its power, and that was the essential thing.

It was not to Eppie, as he further assured himself, that he was susceptible. Eppie stood for life, personified its appeals; he could feel, yet be unmoved, by all life’s blandishments.

Meanwhile on a very different plane—the after all remote plane of mental encounters and skirmishes—he felt, with relief, that he was entirely master of his own meaning. There were many of these skirmishes, and though he did not believe any of them planned, believe that she was carrying out her threat of conscious attack, he was aware that she was alert and inquisitive, and dexterously quick at taking any occasion that offered for further penetration.

The first of these occasions was on Sunday evening when, after tea and in the gloaming, they sat together in the deep window-seat of one of the library windows and listened to Miss Barbara softly touching the chords of a hymn on the plaintive old piano and softly singing—a most unobtrusive accompaniment, at her distance and with her softness, for any talk or any thoughts of theirs. They had talked very little, watching the sunset burn itself out over the frosty moorland, and Gavan presently, while he listened, closed his eyes and leaned his head back upon the oak recess. Eppie, looking now from the sunset to him, observed him with an open, musing curiosity. His head, leaning back in the dusk, was like the ivory carving of a dead saint—a saint young, beautiful, at peace after long sorrow. Peace; that was the quality that his whole being expressed, though, with opened eyes, his face had the more human look of patience, verging now and then on a quiet dejection that would overspread his features like a veil. In boyhood, the peace, the placid dejection, had not been there; his face then had shown the tension of struggle and endurance.

“Till in the ocean of thy love
We lose ourselves in heaven above,”

Miss Barbara quavered, and Gavan, opening his eyes at the closing cadence, found Eppie’s bent upon him. He smiled, and looked still more, she thought, the sad saint, all benediction and indifference, and an impulse of antagonism to such sainthood made her say, though smiling back, “How I dislike those words.”

“Do you?” said Gavan.

“Hate them? Why, dear child?” asked Miss Barbara, who had heard through the sigh of her held-down pedal.

“I don’t want to lose myself,” said Eppie. “But I didn’t mean that I wanted you to stop, Aunt Barbara. Do go on. I love to hear you sing, however much I disapprove of the words.”

But Miss Barbara, clasping and unclasping her hands a little nervously, and evidently finding the moment too propitious to be passed over, backed as she was by an ally, rose and came to them.

“That is the very point you are so mistaken about, dear. It’s the self, you know, that keeps us from love.”

“It’s the self that makes love possible,” said Eppie, taking her hand and looking up at her. “Do you want to lose me, Aunt Barbara? If you lose yourself you will have to lose me too, you know.”

Miss Barbara stood perplexed but not at all convinced by these subtleties, turning mild eyes of query upon Gavan and evidently expecting him to furnish the obvious retort.

“We will all be at one with God,” she reverently said at length, finding that her ally left the defense to her.

Eppie met this large retort cheerfully. “You can’t love God unless you have a self to love him with. I know what you mean, and perhaps I agree with what you really mean; but I want to correct your Buddhistic tendencies and to keep you a good Christian.”

“I humbly hope I’m that. You shouldn’t jest on such subjects, Eppie dear.”

“I’m not one bit jesting,” Eppie protested. And now Gavan asked, while Miss Barbara looked gratefully at him, sure of his backing, though she might not quite be able to understand his methods, “Are they such different creeds?”

Still holding her aunt’s hand and still looking up into her face, Eppie answered: “One is despair of life, the other trust in life. One takes all meaning out of life and the other fills it with meaning. The secret of one is to lose life, and the secret of the other to gain it. There is all the difference in the world between them; all the difference between life and death.”

“As interpreted by Western youth and vigor, yes; but what of the mystics? I suppose you would call them Christians?”

“Yes, dear, they are Christians. What of them?” Miss Barbara echoed, though slightly perturbed by this alliance with heathendom.

“Buddhists, not Christians,” Eppie retorted.

“That’s what I mean; in essentials they are the same creed: the differences are only the differences of the races or individuals who hold them.”

At this Miss Barbara’s free hand began to flutter and protest. “Oh, but, Gavan dear, there I’m quite sure that you are wrong. Buddhism is, I don’t doubt, a very noble religion, but it’s not the true one. Indeed they are not the same, Gavan, though Christianity, of course, is founded on the renunciation of self. ‘Lose your life to gain it,’ Eppie dear.”

“Yes, to gain it, that’s just the point. One renounces, and one wins a realer self.”

“What is real? What is life?” Gavan asked, really curious to hear her definition.

She only needed a moment to find it, and, with her answer, gave him her first glance during their battledore colloquy with innocent Aunt Barbara as the shuttlecock. “Selves and love.”

“Well, of course, dear,” Miss Barbara cried. “That’s what heaven will be. All love and peace and rest.”

“But you have left out the selves; you won’t get love without them. And as for rest and peace—Love is made by difference, so that as long as there is love there must be restlessness.”

“Isn’t it made by sameness?” Gavan asked.

“No, by incompleteness: one loves what could complete oneself and what one could complete; or so it seems to me.”

“And as long as there are selves, will there be suffering, too?”

Her eyes met his thought fearlessly.

“That question, I am sure, is the basis for all the religions of cowardice, religions that deny life because of their craving for peace.”

“Isn’t the craving for peace as legitimate as the craving for life?”

“Nothing that denies life can be legitimate. Life is the one arbitrator. And restlessness need not mean suffering. A symphony is all restlessness—a restlessness made by difference in harmony; forgive the well-worn metaphor, but it is a good one. And, suppose that it did mean suffering, all of it. Isn’t it worth it?” Her eyes measured him, not in challenge, but quietly.

“What a lover of life you are,” he said. It was like seeing him go into his house and, not hastily, but very firmly, shut the door. And as if, rather rudely, she hurled a stone at the shut door, she asked, “Do you love anything?”

He smiled. “Please don’t quarrel with me.”

“I wish I could make you quarrel. I suspect you of loving everything,” Eppie declared.

She didn’t pursue him further on this occasion, when, indeed, he might accuse himself of having given her every chance; but on the next day, as they sat out at the edge of the birch-wood in a wonderfully warm afternoon sun, he, she, and Peter the dog (what a strange, changed echo it was), she returned, very lightly, to their discussion, tossing merely a few reconnoitering flowers in at his open window.

She had never, since their remeeting, seemed to him so young. Holding a little branch of birch, she broke off and aimed bits of its bark at a tall gorse-bush near them. Peter basked, full length, in the sunlight at their feet. The day had almost the indolent quiet of summer.

Eppie said, irrelevantly, for they had not been talking of that, but of people again, gossiping pleasantly, with gossip tempered to the day’s mildness: “I can’t bear the religions of peace, you see—any faith that takes the fight out of people. That Molly Carruthers I was telling you about has become a Christian Scientist, and she is in an imbecile condition of beatitude all the time. ‘Isn’t the happiness that comes of such a faith proof enough?’ she says to me. As if happiness were a proof! A drunkard is happy. Some people seem to me spiritually tipsy, and as unfit for usefulness as the drunkard. I think I distrust anything that gives a final satisfaction.”

She amused him in her playing with half-apprehended thoughts. Her assurance was as light as though they were the bits of birch-bark she tossed.

“You make me think a little of Nietzsche,” he said.

“I should rather like Nietzsche right side up, I think. As he is standing on his head most of the time, it’s rather confusing. If it is a blind, unconscious force that has got hold of us, we get hold of it, and of ourselves, when we consciously use it for our own ends. But I’m not a bit a Nietzschian, Gavan, for, as an end, an Overman doesn’t at all appeal to me and I don’t intend to make myself a bridge for him to march across. Of course Nietzsche might reply, ‘You are the bridge, whether you want to be or not.’ He might say, ‘It’s better to walk willingly to your inevitable holocaust than to be rebelliously haled along; whatever you do, you are only the refuse whose burning makes the flame.’ I reply to that, that if the Overman is sure to come, why should I bother about him? I wouldn’t lift my finger for a distant perfection in which I myself, and all those I loved, only counted as fuel. But, on the other hand, I do believe that each one of us is going to grow into an Overman—in a quite different sense. Peter, too, will be an Overdog, and will, no doubt, sometime be more conscious than we are now.”

Gavan glanced at her and at Peter with his vague, half-unseeing glance.

“Why don’t you smile?” Eppie asked. “Not that you don’t smile, often. But you haven’t a scrap of gaiety, Gavan. Do stop soaring in the sky and come down to real things, to the earth, to me, to dear little rudimentary Overdogs.”

“Do you think that dear little rudimentary dogs are nearer reality than the sky?” He did smile now.

“Much nearer. The sky is only a background, an emptiness that shows up their meaning.”

She had brought him down, for his eyes lingered on her as she leaned to Peter and pulled him up from his sun-baked recumbency. “Come, sit up, Peter; don’t be so comfortable. Watch how well I’ve trained him, Gavan. Now, Peter, sit up nicely. A dog on all fours is a darling heathen; but a dog sitting up on his hind legs is an ethical creature, and well on his way to Overdogdom. Peter on his hind legs is worth all your tiresome Hindoos—aren’t you, dear, Occidental dog?”

He knew that through her gaiety she was searching him, feeling her way, with a merry hostility that she didn’t intend him to answer. It was as if she wouldn’t take seriously, not for a moment, the implications of his thought—implications that he suspected her of already pretty sharply guessing at. To herself, and to him, she pretended that such thoughts were a game he played at, until she should see just how seriously she might be forced to take them.

VII

OR the next few days he found himself involved in Eppie’s sleuth-hound pursuit of the transgressing publican, amused, but quite willing,—somewhat, he saw, to her surprise,—to help her in her crusade. Not only did he tramp over the country with her in search of evidence, and expound the Gothenberg system to Sir Alec, to the general, to the rather alarmed quarry himself,—not unwilling to come to terms,—but the application of his extraordinarily practical good-sense to the situation was, she couldn’t help seeing, far more effective than her own not altogether temperate zeal.

She was surprised and she was pleased; and at the same time, throughout all the little drama, she had the suspicion that it meant for him what that playing of dolls with her in childhood had meant—mere kindliness, and a selfless disposition to do what was agreeable to anybody.

It was on the Saturday following the talk in the library that an incident occurred that made her vision of his passivity flame into something more ambiguous—an incident that gave margins for possibilities in him, for whose bare potentiality she had begun to fear.

They were at evening in the gray, bleak village street, and outside one of the public-houses found a small crowd collected, watching, with the apathy of custom, the efforts of Archie MacHendrie’s wife to lead him home. Archie, a large, lurching man, was only slightly drunk, but his head, the massive granite of its Scotch peasant type, had been brutalized by years of hard drinking. It showed, as if the granite were crumbling into earth, sodden depressions and protuberances; his eye was lurid, heavy, yet alert. Mrs. MacHendrie’s face, looking as though scantily molded in tallow as the full glare of the bar-room lights beat upon it, was piteously patient. The group, under the cold evening sky, in the cold, steep street, seemed a little epitome of life’s degradation; the sordid glare of debasing pleasure lit it; the mean monotony of its daily routine surrounded it in the gaunt stone cottages; above it was the blank, hard sky.

Gavan saw all the unpleasing picture, placed it, its past, its future, as he and Eppie approached; saw more, too, than degradation: for the wife’s face, in its patience, symbolized humanity’s heroism. Both heroism and degradation were results as necessary as the changes in a chemical demonstration; neither had value: one was a toadstool growth, the other, a flower; this was the fact to him, though the flower touched him and the toadstool made him shrink.

“There, there, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie was pleading, “come awa hame, do.”

Archie was declaiming on some wrong he had suffered and threatened to do for an enemy.

That these flowers and toadstools were of vital significance to Eppie, Gavan realized as she left him in the middle of the street and strode to the center of the group. It fell aside for her air of facile, friendly authority, and in answer to her decisive, “What’s the matter?” one of the apathetic onlookers explained in his deliberate Scotch: “It’s nobbut Archie, Miss Eppie; he’s swearin’ he’ll na go hame na sleep gin he’s lickit Tam Donel’. He’s a wee bit the waur for the drink and Tam’ll soon be alang, and the dei’ll be in it gar his gudewife gets him ben.”

“Well, she must get him ben,” said Eppie, her eye measuring Archie, who shook a menacing fist in the direction of his expected antagonist.

“We must get him home between us, Mrs. MacHendrie. He’ll think better of it in the morning.”

“Fech, an’ it’s that I’m aye tellin’ him, Miss Eppie; it’s the mornin’ he’ll hae the sair head. Ay, Miss Eppie, he’s an awfu’ chiel when he’s a wee bittie fou.” Mrs. MacHendrie put the fringe of her shawl to her eyes.

Archie’s low thunder had continued during this dialogue without a pause, and Eppie now addressed herself to him in authoritative tones. “Come on, Archie. Go home and get a sleep, at all events, before you fight Tom.”

“It’s that I’m aye tellin’ you, Archie mon,” Mrs. MacHendrie wept.

Archie now brought his eye round to the speakers and observed them in an ominous silence, his thoughts turned from more distant grievances. From his wife his eye traveled back to Eppie, who met it with a firm severity.

“Damn ye for an interferin’ fishwife!” suddenly and with startling force he burst out. “Ye’re no but a meddlesome besom. Awa wi’ ye!” and from this broadside he swung round to his wife with uplifted fists. Flinging herself between them, Eppie found herself swept aside. Gavan was in the midst of the sudden uproar. Like a David before Goliath, he confronted Archie with a quelling eye. Mrs. MacHendrie had slipped into the dusk, and the bald, ugly light now fell on Gavan’s contrasting head.

“Un sage qui passe interrompt mille drâmes,” flashed in Eppie’s mind. But on this occasion, the sage had to do more than pass—was forced, indeed, to provide the drama. He was speaking in a voice so dispassionately firm that had Archie been a little less drunk or a little less sober it must have exerted an almost hypnotic effect upon him. But the command to go home reached a brain inflamed and hardly dazed. Goliath fell upon David, and Eppie, with a curious mingling of exultation and panic, saw the two men locked in an animal struggle. For a moment Gavan’s cool alertness and scientific resource were overborne by sheer brute force; in another he had recovered himself, and Archie’s face streamed suddenly with blood. Another blow, couched like a lance, it seemed, was in readiness, wary and direct, when Mrs. MacHendrie, from behind, seized Gavan around the neck and, with a shrill scream, hung to him and dragged him back. Helpless and enmeshed, he received a savage blow from her husband, and, still held in the wife’s strangling clutch, he and she reeled back together. At this flagrant violation of fair play the onlookers interposed. Archie was dragged off, and Eppie, catching Gavan as he staggered free of his encumbrance, turned, while she held him by the shoulders, fiercely on Mrs. MacHendrie. “You well deserve every thrashing you get,” she said, her voice stilled by the very force of its intense anger.

Mrs. MacHendrie had covered her face with her shawl. “My mon was a’ bluid,” she sobbed. “I couldna stan’ an’ see him done to death.”

“Of course you couldn’t; it was most natural of you,” said Gavan. The blood trickled over his brow and cheek as, gently freeing himself from Eppie, he straightened his collar and looked at Mrs. MacHendrie with sympathetic curiosity.

“Natural!” said Eppie. “It was dastardly. You deserve every thrashing you get. I hope no one will interfere for you next time.”

“My dear Eppie!” Gavan murmured, while Mrs. MacHendrie continued to weep humbly.

“Why shouldn’t I say it? I am disgusted with her.” Eppie turned almost as fierce a stillness of look and tone upon him as upon Mrs. MacHendrie. “Let me tie up your head, Gavan. Yes, indeed, you are covered with blood. I suppose you never thought, Mrs. MacHendrie, that your husband might kill Mr. Palairet.” She passed her handkerchief around Gavan’s forehead as she spoke, knotting it with fingers at once tender and vindictive.

“I canna say, Miss Eppie,” came Mrs. MacHendrie’s muffled voice from the shawl. “The wan’s my ain mon. It juist cam’ ower me, seein’ him a’ bluid.”

“Well, you have the satisfaction now of seeing Mr. Palairet a’ bluid.” Eppie tied her knots, and Gavan, submitting a bowed head to her ministrations, still kept his look of cogitating pity upon Mrs. MacHendrie. “You see how your husband has wounded him,” Eppie went on; “the handkerchief is red already. Come on, Gavan; lean on me, please. Let her get her husband home now as best she can.”

But Gavan ignored his angry champion. Mrs. MacHendrie’s sorrow, most evidently, interested him more than Eppie’s indignation. He went to her, putting down the hand that held the shawl to the poor, disfigured, tallow face, and made her look at him, while he said with a gentle reasonableness: “Don’t mind what Miss Gifford says; she is angry on my account and doesn’t really mean to be so hard on you. I’m not at all badly hurt,—I can perfectly stand alone, Eppie,—and I’m sorry I had to hurt your husband. It was perfectly natural, what you did. Don’t cry; please don’t cry.” He smiled at her, comforted her, encouraged her. “They are taking your husband home, you see; he is going quite quietly. And now we will take you home. Take my arm. You are the worst off of us all, Mrs. MacHendrie.”

Eppie, in silence, stalked beside him while he led Mrs. MacHendrie, dazed and submissive, up the village street. A neighbor’s wife was in kindly waiting and Archie already slumbering heavily on his bed. Eppie suspected, as they went, that she saw a gold piece slipped from Gavan’s hand to Mrs. MacHendrie’s.

“Poor thing,” he said, when they were once more climbing the steep street, “I ‘m afraid I only made things worse for her”; and laughing a little, irrepressibly, he looked round at Eppie from under his oddly becoming bandage. “My dear Eppie, what a perfect brute you were to her!”

“My dear Gavan, I can’t feel pity for such a fool. Oh, yes I can, but I don’t want to. Please remember that I, too, have impulses, and that I saw you ‘a’ bluid.’”

“Well, then, I’m the brute for scolding you, and you are another poor thing.”

“Are you incapable of righteous indignation, Gavan?”

“Surely I showed enough to please you in my treatment of Archie.”

“You showed none. You looked supremely indifferent as to whether he killed you or you him.”

“Oh, I think I was quite anxious to do for him.”

They were past the village now and upon the country road, and in the darkness their contrasting voices rang oddly—hers deep with its resentful affection, his light with its amusement. It was as if the little drama, that he had made instead of interrupting, struck his sense of the ridiculous. Yet, angry with him as she was, a thrill of exultation remained, for Eppie, in the thought of his calm, deliberate face, beautiful before its foe, and with blood upon it.

VIII

AVAN’S hurt soon healed, though it made him languid for a day or two—days of semi-invalidism, the unemphatic hours, seemingly so colorless, when she read to him or merely sat silently at hand occupied with her letters or a book, drawing still closer their odd intimacy; it could hardly be called sudden, for it had merely skipped intervening years, and it couldn’t be called a proved intimacy, the intervening years were too full, too many for that. But they were very near in their almost solitude—a solitude surrounded by gentle reminders of the closer past, reminders, in the case of living personalities, who seemed to find the intimacy altogether natural and needing no comment. What the general and Miss Barbara might really be thinking was a wonder that at moments occupied both Gavan and Eppie’s ruminations; but it wasn’t a wonder that needed to go far or deep. What they thought, the dear old people, made very little difference—not even the difference of awkwardness or self-consciousness under too cogitating eyes. Even if they thought the crude and obvious thing it didn’t matter, they would so peacefully relapse from their false inference once time had set it straight for them. Eppie couldn’t quite have told herself why its obviousness was so crude; in all her former experience such obviousness had never been so almost funnily out of the question. But Gavan made so many things almost funnily out of the question.

It was this quality in him, of difference from usual things, that drew intimacy so near. To talk to him with a wonderful openness, to tell him about herself, about her troubles, was like sinking down in a pale, peaceful church and sighing out everything that lay heavily on one’s heart—the things that lay lightly, too, for little things as well as great, were understood by that compassionate, musing presence—to the downlooking face of an imaged saint.

No claim upon one remained after it; one was freed of the load of silence and one hadn’t in the least been shackled by retributory penances. And if one felt some strange lack in the saint, if his sacerdotal quality was more than his humanity, it was just because of that that one was able to say anything one liked.

At moments, it is true, she had an odd, fetish-worshiper’s impulse to smash her saint, and perhaps the reason why she never yielded to it was because, under all the seeing him as image, was the deep hoping that he was more. If he was more, much more, it might be unwise to smash him, for then she would have no pale church in which to take refuge, and, above all, if he were more he mustn’t find it out—and she mustn’t—through any act of her own. The saint himself must breathe into life and himself step down from his high pedestal. That he cared to listen, that he listened lovingly,—just as he had listened lovingly to Mrs. MacHendrie,—she knew.

One day when he was again able to be out and when they were again upon the hilltop, walking in a mist that enshrouded them, she told him all about the wretched drama of her love-affair.

She had never spoken of it to a human being.

It was as if she led him into an empty room, dusty and dark and still, with dreary cobwebs stretching over its once festal furniture, and there pointed out to him faded blood-stains on the floor. No eyes but his had ever seen them.

She told him all, analyzing the man, herself, unflinchingly, putting before him her distracted heart, distorted in its distraction. She had appalled herself. Her part had not been mere piteous nobility. She would have dragged herself through any humiliation to have had him back, the man she had helplessly adored. She would have taken him back on almost any terms. Only the semblance of pride had been left to her; beneath it, with all her scorn of him, was a craving that had been base in its despair.

“But that wasn’t the worst,” said Eppie; “that very baseness had its pathos. Worst of all were my mean regrets. I had sacrificed my ambitions for him; I had refused a man who would have given me the life I wanted, a high place in the world, a great name, power, wide issues,—and I love high places, Gavan, I love power. When I refused him, he too married some one else, and it was after that that my crash came. Love and faith were thrown back at me, and I hadn’t in it all even my dignity. I was torn by mingled despairs. I loathed myself. Oh, it was too horrible!”

His utter lack of sympathetic emotion, even when she spoke with the indignant tears on her cheeks, made it all the easier to say these fundamental things, and more than ever like the saint of ebony and ivory in the pale church was his head against the great wash of mist about them.

“And now it has all dropped from you,” he said.

“Yes, all—the love, the regret certainly, even the shame. The ambition, certainly not; but in that ugly form of a loveless marriage it’s no longer a possible temptation for me. My disappointment hasn’t driven me to worldly materialism. It’s a sane thing in nature, that outgrowing of griefs, though it’s bad for one’s pride to see them fade and one’s heart mend, solidly mend, once more.”

“They do go, when one really sees them.”

“Some do.”

“All, when one really sees them,” he repeated unemphatically. “I know all about it, Eppie. I’ve been through the fire, too. Now that it’s gone, you see that it’s only a dream, that love, don’t you?”

Eppie gazed before her into the mist, narrowing her eyes as though she concentrated her thoughts upon his exact meaning, and she received his casual confidence with some moments of silence.

“That would imply that seeing destroyed feeling, wouldn’t it?” she said at last. “I see that such love is a dream, if you will; but dreams may be mirrors of life, not delusions; hints of an awakened reality.”

He showed only his unmoved face. This talk, so impersonal, with all its revealment of human pathos and weakness, so much a picture that they both looked at it together,—a picture of outlived woe,—claimed no more than his contemplation; but when her voice seemed to grope toward him, questioning in its very clearness of declaration, he felt again the flitting fear that he had already recognized, not as danger, but as discomfort. It flitted only, hardly stirred the calm he showed her, as the wings of a flying bird just skim and ruffle the surface of still, deep waters. That restless bird, always hovering, circling near, its shadow passing, repassing over the limpid water—he saw and knew it as the water might reflect in its stillness the bird’s flight. Life; the will to live, the will to want, and to strive, and to suffer in striving. All the waters of Eppie’s soul were broken by the flight of this bird of life; its wings, cruel and beautiful, furrowed and cut; its plumage, darkly bright, was reflected in every wave.

He said nothing after her last words.

“You think all feelings delusions, Gavan?”

“Not that, perhaps, but very transitory; and to be tied to the transitory is to suffer.”

“On that plan one ends with nothingness.”

“Do you think so?”

“Do you think so?” She turned his question on him and her eyes, with the question, fixed hard on his face.

He felt suddenly that after all the parrying and thrusting she had struck up his foil and faced him with no mask of gaiety—in deadly earnest. There was the click of steel in the question.

He did not know whether he were the more irritated, for her sake, by her persistency, or the more fearful that, unwillingly, he should do her faith some injury.

“I think,” he said, “more or less as Tolstoi thinks. You understood all that very well the other evening; so why go into it?”

“You think that our human identity is unreal—an appearance?”

“Most certainly.”

“And that the separation between us is the illusion that makes hatred and evil, and that with the recognition of the illusion, love would come and all selfish effort cease?”

“Yes.”

“And don’t you see that what that results in is the Hindoo thing, the abolishing of consciousness, the abolishing of life—of individual life?”

“Yes, I see that,” Gavan smiled, “but I’m a little surprised to see that you do. So many people are like Aunt Barbara.”

But Eppie was pushing, pushing against the closed doors and would not be lured away by lightness. “Above all, Gavan, do you see that he is merely an illogical Hindoo when he tries to bridge his abyss with ethics? On his own premises he is utterly fatalistic, so that the very turning from the evil illusion, the very breaking down of the barrier of self, is never, with him, the result of an effort of the will, never a conscious choice, but something deep and rudimentary, subconscious, an influx of revelation, a vision that sets one free, perhaps, but that can only leave one with emptiness.”

Above all, as she had said, he saw it; and now he was silent, seeking words that might rid him of pursuit, yet not infect her.

She had stopped short before his silence. Smiling, now, on the background of mist, her eyes, her lips, her poise challenged him, incredulous, actually amused. “Don’t you think that I have an identity?” she asked.

He was willing at that to face her, for he saw suddenly and clearly,—it seemed to radiate from her in the smile, the look,—that he, apparently, couldn’t hurt her. She was too full of life to be in any danger from him, and perhaps the only way of ending pursuit was to fling wide the doors and, since she had said the word, show her the emptiness within.

“You force me to talk cheap metaphysics to you, Eppie, but I’ll try to say what I do think,” he said. “I believe that the illusion of a separate identity, self-directing and permanent, is the deepest and most tenacious of all illusions—the illusion that makes the wheels go round, the common illusion that makes the common mirage. The abolishing of the identity, of the self, is the final word of science, and of philosophy, and of religion, too. The determinism of science, the ecstatic immediacy of the mystic consciousness, the monistic systems of the Absolutists, all tend toward the final discovery that,—now I’m going to be very glib indeed,—but one must use the technical jargon,—that under all the transitory appearance is a unity in which, for which, diversity vanishes.”

Eppie no longer smiled. She had walked on while he spoke, her eyes on him, no longer amused or incredulous, with an air now of almost stern security.

“Odd,” she said presently, “that such a perverse and meaningless Whole should be made up of such significant fragments.”

“Ah, but I didn’t say that Reality was meaningless. It has all possible meaning for itself, no doubt; it’s our meaning for it that is so unpleasantly ambiguous. We are in it and for it, as if we were the kaleidoscope it turned, the picture it looked at; and we are and must be what it thinks or sees. Your musical simile expressed it very nicely: Reality an eternal symphony and our personalities the notes in it—discords to our own limited consciousness, but to Reality necessary parts of the perfect whole. Reality is just that will to contemplate, to think, the infinite variety of life, and it usually thinks us as wanting to live. All ethics, all religions, are merely records of the ceasing of this want. A man comes to see himself as discord, and with the seeing the discord is resolved to silence. One comes to see as the Reality sees, and since it is perfectly satisfied, although it is perhaps quite unconscious,—or so some people who think a great deal about it say,—we, in partaking of its vision, find in unconsciousness the goal, and are satisfied.”

“You are satisfied with such a death in life?” Eppie asked in her steady voice.

“What you call life is what I call death, perhaps, Eppie.”

“Your metaphysics may be very cheap; I know very little about them. But if all that were true, I should still say that the illusion is more real than that nothingness—for to us such a reality would be nothingness. And I should say, let us live our reality all the more intensely, since, for us, there is no other.”

“How you care for life,” said Gavan, as he had said it once before. He looked at her marching through the mist like a defiant Valkyrie.

“Care for it? I’ve hated it at times, the bits that came to me.”

“Yet you want it, always.”

“Always,” she repeated. “Always. I have passed a great part of my life in being very unhappy—that is to say, in wanting badly something I’ve not got. Yet I am more glad than I can say to have lived.”

“Probably because you still expect to get what you want.”

“Of course.” She smiled a little now, though a veiled, ambiguous smile. And as they began the steep descent, the mist infolding them more closely, even the semblance of the smile faded, leaving a new sadness.

“Poor Gavan,” she said.

He just hesitated. “Why?”

“Your religion is a hatred, a distrust of life; mine is trust in it, love of it. You see it as a sort of murderous uncle, beckoning to the babes in the wood; I own that I wouldn’t stir a step to follow it if I suspected it of such a character. And I see life—“ She paused here, looking down, musing, it seemed, on what she saw, and the pause grew long. In it, suddenly, Gavan knew again the invasion of emotion. Her downcast, musing face pervaded his consciousness with that sense of trembling. “You see life as what?” he asked her, not because he wanted to know, but because her words were always less to him than her silences.

Eppie, unconscious, was finding words.

“As something mysterious, beautiful. Something strange, yet near, like the thought of a mother about her unborn child, but, more still, like the thought of an unborn child about its unknown mother. We are such unborn children. And this something mysterious and beautiful says: Come; through thorns, over chasms, past terrors, and in darkness. So, one goes.”

Gavan was silent. Looking up at him, her eyes full of her own vision, she saw tears in his.

For a moment the full benignity, sweet, austere, of a maternal thing in her rested on him, so that it might have been she who said “Come.” Then, looking away from him again, knowing that she had seen more than he had meant to show, she said, “Own that if it’s all illusion, mine’s the best to live with.”

He had never seen her so beautiful as at this moment when she did not pursue, but looked away, quiet in her strength, and he answered mechanically, conscious only of that beauty, that more than beauty, alluring when it no longer pursued: “No; there are no thorns, nor chasms, nor terrors any longer for me. I am satisfied, Eppie.”

She was walking now, a little ahead of him, down the thread-like path that wound among phantom bracken. The islet of space where they could see seemed like a tiny ship gliding forward with them into a white, boundless ocean. Such, thought Gavan, was human life.

In a long silence he felt that her mood had changed. Over her shoulder she looked round at him at last with her eyes of the spiritual steeplechaser. “It’s war to the knife, Gavan.”

She hurt him in saying it. “You only have the knife,” he answered, and his gentleness might have reproached the sudden challenge.

“You have poison.”

“I never put it to your lips, dear.”

She saw his pain. “Oh, don’t be afraid for me,” she said. “I drink your poison, and it is a tonic, a wine, that fills me with greater ardor for the fight.”

IX

HEY were on the path that led to the deeply sunken garden gate, and they had not spoken another word while they followed it, while they stooped a little under the tangle of ivy that drooped from the stone lintel, while they went past the summer-house and on between the rows of withered plants and the empty, wintry spaces of the garden; only when they were nearly at the house, under the great pine-tree, did Eppie cheerfully surmise that they would be exactly on time for tea, and by her manner imply that tea was far more present to her thoughts than daggers or poison.

He felt that in some sense matters had been left in the lurch. He didn’t quite know where he stood for her with his disastrous darkness about him—whether she had really taken up a weapon for open warfare or whether she hadn’t wisely fallen back upon the mere pleasantness of friendly intercourse, turning her eyes away from his accompanying gloom.

He was glad to find her alone that evening after dinner when he had left the general in the smoking-room over a review and a cigar. Miss Barbara had gone early to bed, so that Eppie, in her white dress, as on the night of his arrival, had the dark brightness of the firelit room all to herself. He was glad, because the sense of uncertainty needed defining, and uncertainty, since that last moment of trembling, had been so acute that any sort of definition would be a relief.

An evening alone with her, now that they were really on the plane of mutual understanding, would put his vague fears to the test. He would learn whether they must be fled from or whether, as mere superficial tremors, tricks of the emotions, they could not be outfaced smilingly. He really didn’t want to run away, especially not until he clearly knew from what he ran.

Eppie sat before the fire on the low settle, laying down a book as he came in. In her aspect of exquisite worldliness, the white dress displaying her arms and shoulders with fashionable frankness, she struck him anew as being her most perfectly armed and panoplied self. Out on the windy hillside or singing among the woods, nature seemed partially to absorb and possess her, so that she became a part of the winds and woods; but indoors, finished and fine from head to foot, her mastered conventionality made her the more emphatically personal. She embodied civilization in her dress, her smile, her speech, her very being; the loose coils of her hair and the cut of her satin shoe were both significant of choice, of distinctive simplicity; and the very bareness of her shoulders—Gavan gave an amused thought to the ferociously sensitive Tolstoi—symbolized the armor of the world-lover, the world-user. It was she who possessed the charms and weapons of the civilization that crumbled to dust in the hand of the Russian mystic. He could see her confronting the ascetic’s eye with the challenge of her radiant and righteous self-assurance. Her whole aspect rebuilt that shattered world, its pomp and vanity, perhaps, its towering scale of values; each tier narrowing in its elimination of the lower, cruder, less conscious, more usual; each pinnacle a finely fretted flowering of the rare; a dazzling palace of foam. She embodied all that; but, more than all for Gavan, she embodied the deep currents of trust that flowed beneath the foam.

Her look welcomed him, though without a smile, as he drew a deep chair to the fire and sat down near her, and for a little while they said nothing, he watching her and she with gravely downcast eyes.

“What are you thinking of?” he asked at last.

“Of you, of course,” she answered. “About our talk this afternoon; we haven’t finished it yet.”

She, too, then, had felt uncertainty that needed relief.

“Are you sharpening your knife?”

She put aside his lightness. “Gavan, we are friends. May I talk as I like to you?”

“Of course you may. I’ve always shown you that.”

“No, you have tried to prevent me from talking. But now I will. I have been thinking. It seems to me that it is your life that has so twisted your mind; it has been so joyless.”

“Does that make it unusual?”

“You must love life before you can know it.”

“You must love it, and lose it, before you can know it. I have had joy, Eppie; I have loved life. My experience has not been peculiarly personal; it is merely the history of all thought, pushed far enough.”

“Of all mere thought, yes.”

She rested her head on her hand as she looked at him, seeming to wonder over him and his thought, his mere thought, dispassionately. “Don’t be shy, or afraid, for me. Why should you mind? I’ve given you my story; give me yours. Tell me about your life.”

He felt, suddenly, sunken there in his deep chair, passive and peaceful in the firelight, that it would be very easy to tell her. Why shouldn’t she see it all and understand it all? He couldn’t hurt her; it would be only a strange, a sorrowful picture to her; and to him, yes, there would be a relief in the telling. To speak, for the first time in his life—it would be like the strewing of rosemary on a grave, a commemoration that would have its sweetness and its balm.

But he hesitated, feeling the helplessness of his race before verbal self-expression.

Eppie lent him a hand.

“Begin with when you left me.”

“What was I then? I hardly remember. A tiresome, self-centered boy.”

“No; you weren’t self-centered. You believed in God, then, and you loved your mother. Why have both of them, as personalities, become illusions to you?”

She saw facts clearly and terribly. She was really inside the doors at last, and though it would be all the easier to make her understand the facts she saw, Gavan paled a little before the sudden, swift presence.

For, yes, God was gone, and yes,—worse, far worse, as he knew she felt it,—his mother, too—except as that ghost, that pang of memory.

She saw his pallor and helped him again, to the first and easier avowal.

“How did you lose your faith? What happened to you when you left me?”

“It’s a commonplace enough story, that.”

“Of course it is. But when loss of faith becomes permanent and permanently means a loss of feeling, it’s not so commonplace.”

“Oh, I think it is—more commonplace than people know, in temperaments as unvital and as logical as mine.”

“You are not unvital.”

“My reason isn’t often blurred by my instincts.”

“That is because you are strong—terribly strong. It’s not that your vitality is so little as that your thought is so abnormal.”

“No, no; it’s merely that I understand my own experience.”

But she had put his feet upon the road, and, turning his eyes from her as he looked, he contemplated its vista.

It was easy enough, after all, to gather into words that retrospect of the train; it was easy to be brief and lucid with such a comprehending listener,—to be very impersonal, too; simply to hold up before her eyes the picture that he saw.

His eyes met hers seldom while he told her all that was essential to her true seeing. It was wonderful, the sense of her secure, strong life that made it possible to tell her all.

The stages of his young, restless, tortured thought were swiftly sketched for an intelligence so quick, and the growing intuition of the capriciousness, the suffering of life. He only hesitated when it came to the reunion with his mother, the change that had crept between them; and her illness, her death; choosing his words with a reticence that bit them the more deeply into the listening mind.

But, in the days that followed the death,—days ghost-like, yet sharp,—he lingered, so that she paused with him in that pause of stillness in his life, that morning in the spring woods when everything had softly, gently shown an abiding strangeness. He told her all about that: about the look of the day, not knowing why he so wanted her to see it, too, but it seemed to explain more than anything else—the pale, high sky, the gray branches, the shining water and the little bird that hopped to drink. He himself looked ghost-like while he spoke—sunken, long, dark, impalpable, in the deep chair, his thin white fingers lightly interlocked, his face showing only the oddity of its strange yet beautiful oval and its shadowy eyes and lips. All whiteness and shadow, he might have been a projection from the thought of the woman, who, before him, leaned her head on her hand, warm, breathing, vivid with color, her steady eyes seeing phantoms unafraid.

After that there wasn’t much left to explain, it seemed—except Alice, that last convulsive effort of life to seize and keep him; and that didn’t take long—made, as it were, a little allegory, with nameless abstractions to symbolize the old drama of the soul entrameled and finally set free again. The experience of the spring woods had really been the decisive one. He came back to that again, at the end of his story. “It’s really, that experience, what in another kind of temperament is called conversion.”

Her eyes had looked away from him at last. “No,” she said, “conversion is something that gives life.”

“No,” he rejoined, “it’s something that lifts one above it.”

The fundamental contest spoke again, and after that they were both silent. He, too, had looked away from her when the story was over, and he knew, from her deep, slow breathing, that the story had meant a great deal to her. It was not a laboring breath, nor broken by pain to sighs; but it seemed, in its steady rhythm, to accept and then to conquer what he had put before her. That he should so hear it, not looking at her, filled the silence with more than words; and, as in the afternoon, he sought the relief of words.

“So you see,” he said, in his lighter voice, “thorns and precipices and terrors dissolve like dreams.” She had seen everything and he was ushering her out. But his eyes now met hers, looking across the little space at him.

“And I? Do I, too, dissolve like a dream?” she said.

His smile now was lighter than his voice had been. “Absolutely. Though I own that you are a highly colored phantom. Your color is very vivid indeed. Sometimes it almost masters my thought.”

He had not, in his mere wish for ease, quite known what he meant to say, and now her look did not show him any deepened consciousness; but, suddenly, he felt that under his lightness and her quiet the current ran deeply.

“I master your thought?” she repeated. “Doesn’t that make you distrust thought sometimes?”

“No,” he laughed. “It makes me distrust you, dear Eppie.”

There were all sorts of things before them now. What they were he really didn’t know; perhaps she didn’t, either. At all events he kept his eyes off them, and shaking his crossed foot a little, he still looked at her, smiling.

“Why?” she asked.

He felt that he must now answer her, and himself, in words that wouldn’t imply more than he could face.

“Well, the very force of your craving for life, the very force of your will, might sweep me along for a bit. I might be caught up for a whirl on the wheel of illusion; not that you could ever bind me to it: it would need my own will, blind again, for that.”

Her eyes had met his so steadily that he had imagined only contemplation or perhaps that maternal severity behind the steadiness. But the way in which they received these last tossed pebbles of metaphor showed him unrealized profundities. They deepened, they darkened, they widened on him. They seemed to engulf him in a sudden abyss of pain. And pain in her was indeed a color that could infect him.

“How horrible you are, Gavan,” she said, and her voice went with the words and with the look.

“Eppie!” he exclaimed on a tense, indrawn breath, as if over the sudden stab of a knife. “Have I hurt you?”

Her eyes turned from him. “Not what you say, or do. What you are.”

“You didn’t see, before, what I am?”

“Never—like this.”

He leaned toward her. “Dear Eppie, why do you make me talk? Let me be still. I only ask to be still.”

“You are worse still. Don’t you think I see what stillness means?”

She had pushed her low seat from him,—for he stretched his hands to her with his supplication,—and, rising to her feet, stepping back, she stood before the fire, somberly looking down at him.

Gavan, too, rose. Compunction, supplication, a twist of perplexity and suffering, made him careless of discretion. Face to face, laying his hands on her shoulders, he said: “Don’t let me frighten you. It would be horrible if I could convince you, shatter you.”

Standing erect under his hands, she looked hard into his face.

“You could frighten me, horribly; but you couldn’t shatter me. You are ambiguous, veiled, all in mists. I am as clear, as sharp—.”

Her dauntlessness, the old defiance, were a relief—a really delicious relief. He was able to smile at her, a smile that pled for reassurance. “How can I frighten you, then?”

Her somber gaze did not soften. “Your mists come round me, chill, suffocating. They corrode my clearness.”

“No; no; it’s you who come into them. Don’t. Don’t. Keep away from me.”

“I’m not so afraid of you as that,” she answered.

His hands were still on her shoulders and their eyes on each other—his with their appealing, uncertain smile, and hers unmoved, unsmiling; and suddenly that sense of danger came upon him: as if, in the mist, he felt upon him the breathing, warm, sweet, ominous, of some unseen creature. And in the fear was a strange delight, and like a hand drawn, with slow, deep pressure, across a harp, the nearness drew across his heart, stirring its one sad note—its dumb, its aching note—to a sudden ascending murmur of melody.

He was caught swiftly from this inner tumult by its reflection in her face. She flushed, deeply, painfully. She drew back sharply, pushing his hands from her.

Gavan sought his own equilibrium in an ignoring of that undercurrent.

“Now you are not frightened; but why are you angry?” he asked.

For a moment she did not speak.

“Eppie, I am so sorry. What is it? You are really angry, Eppie!”

Then, after that pause of speechlessness, she found words.

“If I think of you as mist you must not think of me as glamour.” This she gave him straight.

Only after disengaging her train from the settle, from his feet, after wheeling aside his chair to make a clear passage for her departure, did she add: “I have read your priggish Schopenhauer.”

She gave him no time for reply or protestation. Quite mistress of herself, leaving him with all the awkwardness of the situation—if he chose to consider it awkward—upon his hands, very fully the finished mondaine and very beautifully the fearless and assured nymph of the hillside, she went to the piano, turned and rejected, in looking over it, some music, and sitting down, striking a long, full chord, she began to sing, in her voice of frosty dawn, the old Scotch ballad.

He might go or listen as he liked. She had put him away, him and his mists, his ambiguous hold upon her, his ambiguous look at her. She sang to please herself as much as when she had gone up through the woodlands. And if the note of anger still thrilled in her voice she turned it to the uses of her song and made a higher triumph of sadness.

She was still singing when the general came in.

SHE had been quite right; she had seen with her perfect sharpness and clearness indeed, and no wonder that she had been angry. He himself saw clearly, directly the hand was off the harp. It was laughably simple. He was a man, she a woman; they were both young and she was beautiful. That summed it up, sufficiently and brutally; and no wonder, again, that she had felt such summing an offense. It wasn’t in the light of such summings that she regarded herself.

With him she had never, for a moment, made use of glamour. His was the rudimentary impulse, and Gavan’s sensitive cheek echoed her flush when he thought of it. Never again, he promised himself, after this full comprehension of it, should such an impulse dim their friendship. He would make it up to her by helping her to forget it.

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?”

“That defines it well enough.”

“Well, you serve my purpose,” said Eppie, “and that is to have you for my friend.”

She seemed in this parting to have effaced all memory of glamour, but Gavan knew that the deeper one was with him.

It was with him, even while, in the long journey South, he was able to unwrap film after film of the mirage from its central core of reality, to see Eppie, in all her loveliness, in all her noblest aspects, as a sort of incarnation of the world, the flesh, and the devil. He could laugh over the grotesque analogy; it proved to him how far from life he was when its symbol could show in such unflattering terms, and yet it hurt him that he could find it in himself so to symbolize her. It was just because she was so lovely, so noble, that he must—he must—. For, under all, was the wrench that would take time to stop aching.

X

APTAIN PALAIRET had gone to pieces and was now as unpleasant an object as for years he had been a pleasant one.

Gavan’s atrophied selfishness felt only a slight shrinking from the revolting aspects of dissolution, and his father’s condition rather interested him. The captain’s childish clinging to his son was like an animal instinct suddenly asserting itself, an almost vegetable instinct, so little more than mere instinct was it. It affected Gavan much as the suddenly contracting tentacles of a sea-anemone upon his finger might have done. He was not at all touched; but he felt the claim of a possible pang of loneliness and desolation in the dimness of decay, and, methodically, with all the appearances of a solicitous kindness, he responded to the claim.

The man, immersed in his rudimentary universe of sense, showed a host of atavistic fears; fears of the dark, of strange faces, fears of sudden noises or of long stillness. He often wept, leaning his swollen face on Gavan’s shoulder, filled with an abject self-pity.

“You know how I love you, Gavan,” he would again and again repeat, his lax lips fumbling with the words, “always loved you, ever since you were a little fellow—out in India, you know. I and your dear mother loved you better than life,” and, wagging his head, he would repeat, “better than life,” and break into sobs—sobs that ceased when the nurse brought him his wine-jelly. Then it might be again the tone of feeble whining. “It doesn’t taste right, Gavan. Can’t you make it taste right? Do you want to starve me between you all?”

Gavan, with scientific scrutiny, diagnosed and observed while he soothed him or engaged his vagrant mind in games.

In his intervals of leisure he pursued his own work, and rode and walked with all his usual tempered athleticism. He did not feel the days as a strain, hardly as disagreeable; he was indifferent or interested. At the worst he was bored. The undercurrent of pity he was accustomed to living with.

Only at night, in hours of rest, he would sink into a half-dazed disgust, find himself on edge, nearly worn out. So the winter passed.

He was playing draughts with his father on a day in earliest spring, when he was told that Mrs. Arley and Miss Gifford were below.

Gavan was feeling dull and jaded. The conducting of the game needed a monotonous patience and tact. The captain would now pick up a draught and gaze curiously at it for long periods of time, now move in a direction contrary to all the rules of the game and to his own advantage. When such mistakes were pointed out to him he would either apologize humbly or break into sudden peevish wrath. To-day he was in a peculiarly excitable condition and had more than once wept.

Gavan, after the servant’s announcement, holding a quietly expectant draught in his thin, poised fingers, looked hard at the board that still waited for his father’s move. He then felt that a deep flush had mounted to his face.

In spite of the one or two laconic letters that they had interchanged, Eppie had been relegated for many months to her dream-place—a dream, in spite of its high coloring, more distant than this nearer dream of ugly illness. It was painful to look back at the queer turmoil she had roused in him during the autumnal fortnight, and more painful to realize, as in his sudden panic of reluctance now, that, though a dream, she was an abiding and constant one.

Mrs. Arley he knew, and her motor-car had recently made her a next-door neighbor in spite of the thirty miles between them. She was a friend with whom Eppie had before stayed on the other side of the county. Nothing could be more natural than that she and Eppie should drop in upon a solitude that must, to their eyes, have all the finished elements of pathos. Yet he was a little vexed by the intrusion, as well as reluctant to meet it.

His father broke into vehement protest when he heard that he was to be abandoned at an unusual hour, and it needed some time for Gavan and the nurse to quiet him. Twenty minutes had passed before he could go down to his guests, and he surmised that they would feel in this delay yet further grounds for pity.

They were in the hall, before a roaring fire, Eppie standing with her back to it, in a familiar attitude, though her long, caped cloak and hooded motoring-cap, the folds of gray silk gathered under her chin and narrowly framing her face, gave her an unfamiliar aspect. Her eyes met his as he turned the spacious staircase and came down to them, and he felt that they watched his every movement and noted every trace in him of fatigue and dejection.

Mrs. Arley, fluent, flexible, amazingly pretty, for all the light powdering and wrinkling of her fifty years, came rustling forward.

“Eppie is staying with me for the week-end,—I wrench her from her slums now and then,—and we wanted to hear how you are, to see how you are. You look dreadfully fagged; doesn’t he, Eppie? How is your father?”

Eppie gave him her hand in silence.

“My father will never be any better, you know,” he said. “As for me, I’m all right. I should have come over to see you before this, and looked you up, too, Eppie, but I can’t get away for more than an hour or so at a time.”

He led them into the library while he spoke,—Mrs. Arley exclaiming that such devotion was dear and good of him,—and Eppie looked gravely round at the room that he had described to her as the room that he really passed his life in. The great spaces of ranged books framed for her, he knew, pictures of his own existence. He knew, too, that her gravity was the involuntary result of the impression that he made upon her. She was sorry for him. Poor Eppie, their relationship since childhood seemed to have consisted in that—in the sense of her pursuing pity and in his retreat before it, for her sake. He retreated now, as he knew, in his determination to show her that pity was misplaced, uncalled for.

Mrs. Arley had thrown off her wrap and loosened her hood in a manner that made it almost imperative to ask them to stay with him for lunch—an invitation accepted with an assurance showing that it had been expected, and it wasn’t difficult, in conventional battledore and shuttlecock with her, to show a good humor and frivolity that discountenanced pathetic interpretations. What Mrs. Arley’s interpretations were he didn’t quite know; her eyes, fatigued yet fresh, were very acute behind their trivial meanings, and he could wonder if Eppie had shared with her her own sense of his “horribleness,” and if, in consequence, her conception of Eppie’s significance as the opponent of that quality was tinged with sentimental associations.

Eppie’s gaze, while they rattled on, lost something of its gravity, but he was startled, as if by an assurance deeper than any of Mrs. Arley’s, when she rose to slip off her coat and went across the room to a small old mirror that hung near the door to take off her cap as well.

In her manner of standing there with her back to them, untying her veils, pushing back her hair, was the assurance, indeed, of a person whose feet were firmly planted on certain rights, all the more firmly for “knowing her place” as it were, and for having repudiated mistaken assumptions. She might almost have been a new sick-nurse come to take up her duties by his side. She passed from the mirror to the writing-table, examining the books laid there, and then, until lunch was announced, stood looking out of the window. Quite the silent, capable, significant new nurse, with many theories of her own that might much affect the future.

The dining-room at Cheylesford Lodge opened on a wonderful old lawn, centuries in its green. Bordered by beds, just alight with pale spring flowers, it swept in and out among shrubberies of rhododendron and laurel, the emerald nook set in a circle of trees, a high arabesque on the sky.

Eppie from her seat at the table faced the sky, the trees, the lawn. What a beautiful place, she was thinking. A place for life, sheltered, embowered. How she would have loved, as a child, those delicious rivulets of green that ran into the thick mysteries of shadow. How she would have loved to play dolls on a hot summer afternoon in the shade of the great yew-tree that stretched its dark branches half across the sky. The house, the garden, made her think of children; she saw white pinafores and golden heads glancing in and out among the trees and shrubs, and the vision of young life, blossoming, growing in security and sunlight, filled her thought with its pictured songs of innocence, while, at the same time, under the vision, she was feeling it all—all the beauty and sheltered sweetness—as dreadful in its emptiness, its worse than emptiness: a casket holding a death’s-head. She came back with something of a start to hear her work in the slums enthusiastically described by Mrs. Arley. “I thought it was only in novels that children clung to the heroine’s skirts. I never believed they clung in real life until seeing Eppie with her ragamuffins; they adore her.”

This remark, to whose truth she assented by a vague smile, gave Eppie’s thoughts a further push that sent them seeing herself among the golden heads and white pinafores on the lawn at Cheylesford Lodge; and though the vision maintained its loving aunt relationship of the slums, there was now a throb and flutter in it, as though she held under her hand a strange wild bird that only her own will not to look kept hidden.

These dreams were followed by a nightmare little episode.

In the library, again, the talk was still an airy dialogue, Eppie, her eyes on the flames as she drank her coffee, still maintaining her ruminating silence. In the midst of her thoughts and their chatter, the door opened suddenly and Captain Palairet appeared on the threshold.

His head neatly brushed, a sumptuous dressing-gown of padded and embroidered silk girt about him, he stood there with moist eyes and lips, faintly and incessantly shaking through all his frame, a troubling and startling figure.

Gavan had been wondering all through the visit how his father was bearing the abandonment, and his appearance, he saw now, must have been the triumphant fruit of contest with the nurse whose face of helpless disapprobation hovered outside.

Gavan went to his side, and, leaning on his son’s arm, the captain said that he had come to pay his respects to Mrs. Arley and to Miss Gifford.

Taking Mrs. Arley’s hand, he earnestly reiterated his pleasure in welcoming her to his home.

“Gavan’s in fact, you know; but he’s a good son. Not very much in common, perhaps: Gavan was always a book-worm, a fellow of fads and theories; I love a broad life, men and things. No, not much in common, except our love for his mother, my dear, dead wife; that brought us together. We shook hands over her grave, so to speak,” said the captain, but without his usual sentiment. An air of jaunty cheerfulness pervaded his manner. “She is buried near here, you know. You may have seen the grave. A very pretty stone; very pretty indeed. Gavan chose it. I was in India at the time. A great blow to me. I never recovered from it. I forget, for the moment, what the text is; but it’s very pretty; very appropriate. I knew I could trust Gavan to do everything properly.”

Gavan’s face had kept its pallid calm.

“You will tire yourself, father,” he said. “Let me take you up-stairs now. Mrs. Arley and Miss Gifford will excuse us.”

The captain resisted his attempt to turn him to the door.

“Miss Gifford. Yes, Miss Gifford,” he repeated, turning to where Eppie stood attentively watching father and son, “But I want to see Miss Elspeth Gifford. It was that I came for.” He took her hand and his wrecked and restless eyes went over her face. “So this is Miss Elspeth Gifford.”

“You have heard of me?” Eppie’s composure was as successful as Gavan’s own and lent to the scene a certain matter-of-fact convention.

The captain bowed low. “Heard of you? Yes. I have often heard of you. I am glad, glad and proud, to meet at last so much goodness and wit and beauty. You have a name in the world, Miss Gifford. Yes, indeed, I have heard of you.” Suddenly, while he held her hand and gazed at her, his look changed. Tears filled his eyes; a muscle in his lip began to shake; a flush of maudlin indignation purpled his face.

“And you are the girl my son jilted! And you come to our house! It’s a noble action. It’s a generous action. It’s worthy of you, my dear.” He tightly squeezed her hand, Gavan’s attempt—and now no gentle one—to draw him away only making his clutch the more determined.

“No, Gavan, I will not go. I will speak my mind. This is my hour. The time has come for me to speak my mind. Let’s have the truth; truth at all costs is my motto. A noble and generous action. But, my dear,” he leaned his head toward her and spoke in a loud whisper, “you’re well rid of him, you know—well rid of him. Don’t try to patch it up. Don’t come in that hope. So like a woman—I know, I know. But give it up; that’s my advice. Give it up. He’s a poor fellow—a very poor fellow. He wouldn’t make you happy; just take that from me—a friend, a true friend. He wouldn’t make any woman happy. He’s a poor creature, and a false creature, and I’ll say this,” the captain, now trembling violently, burst into tears: “if he has been a false lover to you he has been a bad son to me.”

With both hands, sobbing, he clung to her, while, with a look of sick distress, Gavan tried, not too violently, to draw him from his hold on her.

Eppie had not flushed. “Don’t mind,” she said, glancing at the helpless son, “he has mixed it up, you see.” And, bending on the captain eyes severe in kindly intention, like the eyes of a nurse firmly administering a potion, “You are mistaken about Gavan. It was another man who jilted me. Now let him take you up-stairs. You are ill.”

But the captain still clung, she, erect in her spare young strength, showing no shrinking of repulsion. “No, no,” he said; “you always try to shield him. A woman’s way. He won your heart, and then he broke it, as he has mine. He has no heart, or he’d take you now. Give it up. Don’t come after him. Sir, how dare you! I won’t submit to this. How dare you, Sir!” Gavan had wrenched him away, and in a flare of silly passion he struck at him again and again, like a furious child. It was a wrestle with the animal, the vegetable thing, the pinioning of vicious tentacles. Mrs. Arley fluttered in helpless consternation, while Eppie, firm and adequate, assisted Gavan in securing the wildly striking hands. Caught, held, haled toward the door, the captain became, with amazing rapidity, all smiles and placidity.

“Gently, gently, my dear boy. This is unseemly, you know, very childish indeed. Temper! Temper! You get it from me, no doubt—though your mother could be very spiteful at moments. I’ll come now. I’ve said my say. Well rid of him, my dear, well rid of him,” he nodded from the door.

“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?”

“Grace, you are worse than Captain Palairet,” said Eppie, whose eyes were firmly fixed on the neat leather back of the chauffeur in front of them.

“Don’t be cross, Eppie. Why should you mind my prattle?”

“Because I care for him so much.”

“Well, that’s what I say.”

“No; not as I mean it.”

“He of course cares, as I mean it.”

Eppie did not pause over this.

“It’s something different, quite different, from anything else in the world. It can’t be talked about like that. Please, Grace, never, never be like Captain Palairet again. You haven’t softening of the brain. I shall lose Gavan if my friends and his father have such delusions too openly.”

XI

AVAN went down the noisy, dirty thoroughfare, looking for the turning which would lead him, so the last policeman consulted said, to Eppie’s little square.

It was a May day, suddenly clear after rain, liquid mud below, and above a sharply blue sky, looking its relentless contrast at the reeking, sordid streets, the ugly, hurrying life of the wide thoroughfare.

All along the gutter was a vociferous fringe of dripping fruit-and food-barrows, these more haphazard conveniences faced by a line of gaudy, glaring shops.

The blue above was laced with a tangle of tram-wires and cut with the jagged line of chimney-pots.

The roaring trams, the glaring shops, seemed part of a cruel machinery creative of life, and the grim air of permanence, the width and solidity of the great thoroughfare, were more oppressive to Gavan’s nerves, its ugliness fiercer, more menacing, than the narrower meanness of the streets where life seemed to huddle with more despondency.

In one of these he found that he had, apparently, lost his way.

A random turn brought him to a squalid court with sloping, wet pavement and open doors disgorging, from inner darkness, swarms of children. They ran; tottered on infantile, bandy legs; locked in scuffling groups, screaming shrilly, or squatted on the ground, absorbed in some game.

Gavan surveyed them vaguely as he wandered seeking an outlet. His eye showed neither shrinking nor tenderness, rather a bleak, hard, unmoved pity, like that of the sky above. He was as alien from that swarming, vivid life as the sky; but, worn as he was with months of nervous overstrain, he felt rising within him now and then a faint sense of nausea such as one might feel in contemplating a writhing clot of maggots.

He threaded his way among them all, and at a corner of the court found a narrow exit. This covered passage led, apparently, to another and fouler court, and emerging from it, coming suddenly face to face with him, was Eppie. She was as startling, seen here, as “a lily in the mouth of Tartarus,” and he had a shock of delight in her mere aspect. For Eppie was as exquisite as a flower. Her garments had in no way adapted themselves to mud and misery. Her rough dress of Japanese blue showed at the open neck of its jacket a white linen blouse; her short, kilted skirt swung with the grace of petals; her little upturned cap of blue made her look like a Rosalind ready for a background of woodland glade, streams, and herds of deer.

And here she stood, under that cruel sky, among the unimaginable ugliness of this City of Dreadful Night.

In her great surprise she did not smile, saying, as she gave him her hand, “Gavan! by all that’s wonderful!”

“You asked me to come and see you when I was next in London.”

“So I did.”

“So here I am. I had a day off by chance; some business that had to be seen to.”

“And your father?”

“Slowly going.”

“And you have come down here, for how long?”

“For as long as you’ll keep me. I needn’t go back till night.”

Her eye now wandered away from him to the maggots, one of whom, Gavan observed, had attached itself to her skirt, while a sufficiently dense crowd surrounded them, staring.

“You have a glimpse of our children,” said Eppie, surveying them with, not exactly a maternal, but, as it were, a fraternal eye of affectionate familiarity.

“What’s that, Annie?” in answer to a husky whisper. “Do I expect you to-night? Rather! Is that the doll, Ada? Well, I can’t say that you’ve kept it very tidy. Where’s its pinafore?” She took the soiled object held up to her and examined its garments. “Where’s its petticoat?”

“Please, Miss, Hemly took them.”

“Took them away from you?”

“Yes, Miss.”

“For her own doll, I suppose.”

“Yes, Miss.”

Eppie cogitated. “I’ll speak to Emily about it presently. You shall have them back.”

“Please, Miss, I called her a thief.”

“You spoke the truth. How are you, Billy? You look decidedly better. Gavan, my hands are full for the next hour or so and I can’t even offer to take you with me, for I’m going to sick people. But I shall be back and through with all my work by tea-time, if you don’t mind going to my place and waiting. You’ll find Maude Allen there. She lives down here, and with me when I am here. She is a nice girl, though she will talk your head off.”

“How do I find her? I don’t mind waiting.”