PART II (continued 3)

Miss Allen sat sewing near the crocuses, and, shy and voluble, rose to greet him. She was evidently accustomed to Eppie’s guests—accustomed, too, perhaps, to taking them off her hands, for though she was shy her volubility showed a familiarity with the situation. She was almost as funny a contrast to Eppie as the slum children had been an ugly one. She wore a spare, drab-colored skirt and a cotton shirt, its high, hard collar girt about by a red tie that revealed bone buttons before and behind. Her sleek, fair hair, relentlessly drawn back, looked like a varnish laid upon her head. Her features, at once acute and kindly, were sharp and pink.

She was sewing on solid and distressingly ugly materials.

“Yes, I am usually at home. Miss Gifford is the head and I am the hands, you see,” she smiled, casting quick, upward glances at the long, pale young man in his chair near the fire. “Miss Henderson, Miss Grey, and I live here all year round, and I do so look forward to Miss Gifford’s coming. Oh, yes, it’s a most interesting life. Do you do anything of the sort? Are you going to take up a club? Perhaps you are going into the Church?”

Miss Allen asked her swift succession of questions as if in a mild desperateness.

Gavan admitted that his interest was wholly in Miss Gifford.

“She is interesting,” Miss Allen, all comprehension, agreed. “So many people find her inspiring. Do you know Mr. Grainger, the M.P.? He comes here constantly. He is a cousin, you know. He has known her, of course, ever since she was a child. I think it’s very probable that she influences his political life—oh, quite in a right sense, I mean. He is such a conscientious man—everybody says that. And then she isn’t at all eccentric, you know, as so many fashionable women who come down here are; they do give one so much trouble when they are like that,—all sorts of fads that one has to manage to get on with. She isn’t at all faddish. And she isn’t sentimental, either. I think the sentimental ones are worst—for the people, especially, giving them all sorts of foolish ideas. And it’s not that she doesn’t care. She cares such a lot. That’s the secret of her not getting discouraged, you see. She never loses her spirit.”

“Is it such discouraging work?” Gavan questioned from his chair. With his legs crossed, his hat and stick held on his knee, he surveyed Miss Allen and the crocuses.

“Well, not to me,” she answered; “but that’s very different, for I have religious faith. Miss Gifford hasn’t that, so of course she must care a great deal to make up for it. When one hasn’t a firm faith it is far more difficult, I always think, to see any hope in it all. I think she would find it far easier if she had that. She can’t resign herself to things. She is rather hot-tempered at times,” Miss Allen added, with one of her sharp, shy glances.

Gavan, amused by the idea that Eppie lacked religious faith, inquired whether the settlement were religious in intention, and Miss Allen sighed a little in answering no,—Miss Grey, indeed, was a Positivist. “But we Anglicans are very broad, you know,” she said. “I can work in perfectly with them all—better with Miss Grey and Miss Gifford than with Miss Henderson, who is very, very Low. Miss Gifford goes in more for social conditions and organization—trades-unions, all that sort of thing; that’s where she finds Mr. Grainger so much of a help, I think.” And he gathered from Miss Allen’s further conversation, from its very manner of vague though admiring protest, a clearer conception of Eppie’s importance down here. To Miss Allen, she evidently embodied a splendid, pagan force, ambiguous in its splendor. He saw her slightly shrinking vision of an intent combatant; no loving sister of charity, but a young Bellona, the latest weapons of sociological warfare in her hands, its latest battle-cry on her lips. And all for what? thought Gavan, while, with a sense of contrasting approval, he looked at Miss Allen’s tidy little head against the sunlit crocuses and watched the harmless occupation of her hands. All for life, more life; the rousing of desire; the struggling to higher forms of consciousness. She was in it, the strife, the struggle. He had seen on her face to-day, with all its surprise, perhaps its gladness, that alien look of grave preoccupation that passed from him to the destinies she touched. In thinking of it all he felt particularly at peace, though there was the irony of his assurance that Eppie’s efforts among this suffering life where he found her only resulted in a fiercer hold on suffering. Physical degradation and its resultant moral apathy were by no means the most unendurable of human calamities. Miss Allen’s anodynes—the mere practical petting, soothing, telling of pretty tales—were, in their very short-sightedness, more fitted to the case.

Miss Allen little thought to what a context her harmless prattle was being adjusted. She would have been paralyzed with horror could she have known that to the gentle young man, sitting there so unalarmingly, she herself was only a rather simple symptom of life that he was quietly studying. In so far from suspecting, her shyness went from her; he was so unalarming—differing in this from so many people—that she found it easy to talk to him. And she still had a happy little hope of a closer community of interest than he had owned to. He looked, she thought, very High Church. Perhaps he was in the last stages of conversion.

She had talked on for nearly an hour when another visitor was announced. This proved to be a young man slightly known to Gavan, a graceful, mellifluous youth, whose artificiality of manner and great personal beauty suggested a mingling of absinthe and honey. People had rather bracketed Gavan and Basil Mayburn together; one could easily deal with both as lumped in the same category,—charming drifters, softly disdainful of worldly aims and efforts. Mayburn himself took sympathy for granted, though disconcerted at times by finding his grasp of the older man to be on a sliding, slippery surface. Palairet had, to be sure, altogether the proper appreciations of art and literature, the rhythm of highly evolved human intercourse; the aroma distilled for the esthete from the vast tragic comedy of life; so that he had never quite satisfied himself as to why he could get no nearer on this common footing. Palairet was always charming, always interested, always courteous; but one’s hold did slip.

And to Gavan, Basil Mayburn, with his fluent ecstasies, seemed a sojourner in a funny half-way house. To Mayburn the hallucination of life was worth while esthetically. His own initial appeal to life had been too fundamentally spiritual for the beautiful to be more to him than a second-rate illusion.

Miss Allen greeted Mr. Mayburn with a coolness that at once discriminated for Gavan between her instinctive liking for himself and her shrinking from a man who perplexed and displeased her.

Mayburn was all glad sweetness: delighted to see Miss Allen; delighted to see Palairet; delighted to wait in their company for the delightful Miss Gifford; and, turning to Miss Allen, he went on to say, as a thing that would engage her sympathies, that he had just come from a service at the Oratory.

“I often go there,” he said; “one gets, as nowhere else that I know of in London, the quintessence of aspiration—the age-long yearning of the world. How are your schemes for having that little church built down here succeeding? I do so believe in it. Don’t let any ugly sect steal a march on you.”

Miss Allen primly replied that the plans for the church were prospering; and adding that Miss Gifford would be here in a moment and that she must leave them, she gathered up her work and departed with some emphasis.

“Nice, dear little creature, that,” said Mayburn, “though she does so dislike me. I hope I didn’t say the wrong thing. I never quite know how far her Anglicanism goes; such a pity that it doesn’t go a little further and carry her into a nunnery of the Catholic Church. She is the nun type. She ought to be done up in their delicious costume; it would lend her the flavor she lacks so distressingly now. Did you notice her collar and her hair? Astonishing the way that Eppie makes use of all these funny, guindée creatures whom she gets hold of down here. Have you ever seen Miss Grey?—dogmatic, utilitarian, strangely ugly Miss Grey, another nun type corrupted by our silly modern conditions. She reeks of Comte and looks like a don. And all the rest of them,—the solemn humanitarians, the frothy socialists, the worldly, benign old ecclesiastics,—Eppie works them all; she has a genius for administration. It’s an art in her. It almost consoles one for seeing her wasted down here for so much of the year.”

“Why wasted?” Gavan queried. “She enjoys it.”

“Exactly. That’s the alleviation. Wasted for us, I mean. You have known her for a long time, haven’t you, Palairet?”

Gavan, irked by the question and by the familiarity of Mayburn’s references to their absent hostess, answered dryly that he had known Miss Gifford since childhood; and Mayburn, all tact, passed at once to less personal topics, inquiring with a new earnestness whether Palairet had seen Selby’s Goya, and expatiating on its exquisite horror until the turning of a key in the hall-door, quick steps on the stairs leading up past the sitting-room, announced Eppie’s arrival.

She was with them in a moment, cap and jacket doffed, her muddy shoes changed for slender patent-leather, fresh in her white blouse. She greeted Mayburn, turning to Gavan with, “I’m so glad you waited. You shall both have tea directly.”

With all her crisp kindliness, Gavan fancied a change in her since the greeting of an hour and a half before. Things hadn’t gone well with her. And he could flatter himself, also, with the suspicion that she was vexed at finding their tête-à-tête interrupted.

Mayburn loitered about the room after her while she straightened the shade on the student’s lamp, just brought in, and made the tea, telling her about people, about what was going on in the only world that counted, telling her about Chrissie Bentworth’s astounding elopement, and, finally, about the Goya. “You really must see it soon,” he assured her.

Eppie, adjusting the flame of her kettle, said that she didn’t want to see it.

“You don’t care for Goya, dear lady?”

“Not just now.”

“Well, of course I don’t mean just now. I mean after you have burned out this particular flame. But, really, it’s a sensation before you and you mustn’t miss having it. An exquisite thing. Horror made beautiful.”

“I don’t want to see it made beautiful,” Eppie, with cheerful rudeness, objected.

“Now that,” said Mayburn, drawing up to the tea-table with an appreciative glance for the simple but inviting fare spread upon it—“now that is just where I always must argue with you. Don’t you agree with me, Palairet, that life is beautiful—that it’s only in terms of beauty that it has significance?”

“If you happen to see it so,” Gavan ambiguously assented.

“Exactly; I accept your amendment—if you happen to have the good fortune to see it so; if you have the faculty that gives the vision; if, like Siegfried, the revealing dragon’s-blood has touched your lips. Eppie has the gift and shouldn’t wilfully atrophy it. She shouldn’t refuse to share the vision of the Supreme Artist, to whom all horror and tragedy are parts of the picture that his eternal joy contemplates; she should not refuse to listen with the ear of the Supreme Musician, to whom all the discords that each one of us is, before we taste the dragon’s-blood,—for what is man but a dissonance, as our admirable Nietzsche says,—to whom all these discords melt into the perfect phrase. All art, all truth is there. I’m rather dithyrambic, but, in your more reticent way, you agree with me, don’t you, Palairet?”

Eppie’s eye, during this speech, had turned with observant irony upon Gavan.

“How do you like your echo, Gavan?” she inquired, and she answered for him: “Of course he agrees, but in slightly different terms. He doesn’t care a fig about the symphony or about the Eternal Goya. There isn’t a touch of the ‘lyric rapture’ about him. Now pray don’t ask him to define his own conceptions, and drink your tea. And don’t say one word to me, either, about your gigantic, Bohemian deity. You have spoken of Nietzsche, and I know too well what you are coming to: the Apollonian spirit of the world of Appearances in which the Dionysiac spirit of Things-in-Themselves mirrors its vital ecstasy. Spare me, I’m not at all in the humor to see horror in terms of loveliness.”

“Ay de mi!” Mayburn murmured, “you make me feel that I’m still a dissonance when you talk like this.”

“A very wholesome realization.”

“You are cross with life to-day, and therefore with me, its poor little appreciator.”

“I’m never cross with life.”

“Only with me, then?”

“Only with you, to-day.”

Mayburn, folding his slice of bread-and-butter, took her harshness with Apollonian serenity. “At least let me know that I’ve an ally in you,” he appealed to Gavan, while Eppie refilled her cup with the business-like air of stoking an engine that paused for a moment near wayside trivialities.

Gavan had listened to the dithyrambics with some uneasiness, conscious of Eppie’s observation, and now owned that he felt little interest in the Eternal Goya.

“Don’t, don’t, I pray of you, let him take the color out of life for you,” Mayburn pleaded, turning from this rebuff, tea-cup in hand, to Eppie; and Eppie, with a rather grim smile, again full of reminiscences for Gavan, declared that neither of them could take anything out of it for her.

She kept, after that, the talk in pleasant enough shallows; but Mayburn fancied, more than once, that he heard the grating of his keel on an unpropitious shore. Eppie didn’t want him to-day, that was becoming evident; she wasn’t going to push him off into decorative sailing. And presently, wondering a little if his tact had already been too long at fault, wondering anew about the degree of intimacy between the childhood friends, who had, evidently, secrets in which he did not share, he gracefully departed.

Eppie leaned back in her chair, folded her arms, and closed her eyes as though to give herself the relief of a long silence.

Her hair softly silhouetted against the green shade and the flickering illumination of the firelight upon her, her passive face showed a stern wistfulness. Things had gone wrong with her.

Looking at her, Gavan’s memory went back to the last time they had been together, alone, in firelight, to his impulse and her startlingly acute interpretation of it. Her very aspect now, her closed eyes and folded arms, seemed to show him how completely she disowned, for both of them, even the memory of such an unfitting episode. More keenly than ever he recognized the fineness in her, the generosity, the willingness to outlive trifles, to put them away forever; and the contagion of her somber peace enveloped him.

She remarked presently, not opening her eyes: “I should like to make a bon-fire of all the pictures in the world, all the etchings, the carvings, the tapestries, the bric-à-brac in general,—and Basil Mayburn, in sackcloth and ashes, should light it.”

“What puritanic savagery, Eppie!”

“I prefer the savage puritan to the Basil Mayburn type; at least I do just now.”

“What’s the matter?” Gavan asked, after a little pause.

“Do I show it so evidently?” she asked, with a faint smile. “Everything is the matter.”

“What, in particular, has gone wrong?”

Eppie did not reply at first, and he guessed that she chose only to show him a lesser trouble when she said, “I’ve had a great quarrel with Miss Grey, for one thing.”

“The positivistic lady?”

“Yes; did Maude tell you that? She really is a very first-rate person—and runs this place; but I lost my temper with her—a stupid thing to do, and not suddenly, either, which made it the less excusable.”

“Are your theories so different that you came to a clash?”

“Of course they are different, though it was apparently only over a matter of practical administration that we fought.” Eppie drew a long breath, opening her eyes. “I shall stay on here this spring—I usually go to my cousin Alicia for the season. But one can’t expect things to go as one wants them unless one keeps one’s hand on the engine most of the time. She has almost a right to consider me a meddling outsider, I suppose. I shall stay on till the end of the summer.”

“And smash Miss Grey?”

Eppie, aware of his amusement, turned an unresentful glance upon him.

“No, don’t think me merely brutally dominant. I really like her. I only want to use her to the best advantage.”

At this he broke into a laugh. “Not brutally dominant, I know; but I’m sorry for Miss Grey.”

“Miss Grey can well take care of herself, I assure you.”

“What else has gone wrong?”

Again Eppie chose something less wrong to show him. “The factory where some of my club-girls work has shut down half of its machinery. There will be a great deal of suffering. And we have pulled them above a flippant acceptance of state relief.”

“And because you have pulled them up, they are to suffer more?”

“Exactly, if you choose to put it so,” said Eppie.

He saw that she had determined that he should not frighten her again, or, at all events, that he should never see it if he did frighten her; and he had himself determined that his mist should never again close round her. She should not see, even if she guessed at it pretty clearly, the interpretation that he put upon the afternoon’s frictions and failures, and, on the plane of a matter-of-fact agreement as to practice, he drew her on to talk of her factory-girls, of the standards of wages, the organization of woman’s labor, so that she presently said, “What a pleasure it is to hear you talking sense, Gavan!”

“You have heard me talk a great deal of nonsense, I’m sure.”

“A great deal. Worse than Basil Mayburn’s.”

“I saw too clearly to-day the sorry figure I must have cut in your eyes. I have learned to hold my tongue. When one can only say things that sound particularly silly that is an obvious duty.”

“I am glad to hear you use the word, my dear Gavan; use it, even though it means nothing to you. Glissez mortel, n’appuyez pas should be your motto for a time; then, after some wholesome skating about on what seems the deceptive, glittering surface of things you will find, perhaps, that it isn’t an abyss the ice stretches over, but a firm meadow, the ice melted off it and no more need of skates.”

He was quite willing that she should so see his case; he was easier to live with, no doubt, on this assumption of his curability.

Eppie, still leaning back, still with folded arms, had once more closed her eyes, involuntarily sighing, as though under her own words the haunting echo of the abyss had sounded for her.

She had not yet shown him what the real trouble was, and he asked her now, in this second lull of their talk, “What else is there besides the factory-girls and Miss Grey?”

She was silent for a moment, then said, “You guess that there is something else.”

“I can see it.”

“And you are sorry?”

“Sorry, dear Eppie? Of course.”

“It’s a child, a cripple,” said Eppie. “It had been ill for a long time, but we thought that we could save it. It died this morning. I didn’t know. I didn’t get there in time. I only found out after leaving you this afternoon. And it cried for me.” She had turned her head from him as it leaned against the chair, but he saw the tears slowly rolling down her cheeks.

“I am so sorry, dear Eppie,” he said.

“The most darling child, Gavan.” His grave pity had brought him near and it gave her relief to speak. “It had such a wistful, dear little face. I used to spend hours with it; I never cared for any child so much. What I can’t bear is to think that it cried for me.” Her voice broke. Without a trace, now, of impulse or glamour, he took her hand, repeating his helpless phrase of sympathy. Yes, he thought, while she wept, here was the fatal flaw in any Tolstoian half-way house that promised peace. Love for others didn’t help their suffering; suffering with them didn’t stop it. Here was the brute fact of life that to all peace-mongers sternly said, Where there is love there is no peace.

It was only after her hand had long lain in his fraternal clasp that she drew it away, drying her tears and trying to smile her thanks at him. Looking before her into the fire, and back into a retrospect of sadness, she said: “How often you and I meet death together, Gavan. The poor monkey, and Bobbie, and Elspeth even, ought to count.”

“You must think of me and death together,” he said.

He felt in a moment that the words had for her some significance that he had not intended. In her silence was a shock, and in her voice, when she spoke, a startled thing determinedly quieted.

“Not more than you must think of me and it together.”

“You and death, dear Eppie! You are its very antithesis!”

She did not look at him, and he could not see her eyes, but he knew, with the almost uncanny intuition that he so often had in regard to her, that a rising strength, a strength that threatened something, strove with a sudden terror.

“Life conquers death,” she said at last.

He armed himself with lightness. “Of course, dear Eppie,” he said; “of course it does; always and always. The poor baby dies, and—I wonder how many other babies are being born at this moment? Conquers death? I should think it did!”

“I did not mean in that way,” she answered. She had risen, and, looking at the clock, seemed to show him that their time was over. “But we won’t discuss life and death now,” she said.

“You mean that it’s late and that I must go?” he smiled.

“Perhaps I mean only that I don’t want to discuss,” she smiled back. “Though—yes, indeed, it is late; almost seven. I have a great many things to do this evening, so that I must rest before dinner, and let you go.”

“I may come again?”

“Whenever you will. Thank you for being so kind to-day.”

“Kind, dear Eppie?”

“For being sorry, I mean.”

“Who but a brute would not have been?”

“And you are not a brute.”

The shaded light cast soft upward shadows on her face, revealing sweet oddities of expression. In their shadow he could not fathom her eyes; but a tenderness, peaceful, benignant, even a recovered gaiety, hovered on her brow, her upper lip, her cheeks. It was like a reflection of sunlight in a deep pool, this dim smiling of gratitude and gaiety.

He had a queer feeling, and a profounder one than in their former moment when she had repudiated his helpless emotion, that she spared him, that she restrained some force that might break upon this fraternal nearness. For an instant he wondered if he wanted to be spared, and with the wonder was once more the wrench at leaving her there, alone, in her fire-lit room. But it was her strength that carried them over all these dubious undercurrents, and he so relied on it that, holding her hand in good-by, he said, “I will come soon. I like it here.”

“And you are coming to Kirklands this summer. Uncle expects it. You mustn’t disappoint him, and me. I shall be there for a month.”

“I’ll come.”

“Jim Grainger will be there, too. You remember Jim. You can fight with him from morning till night, but you and I will fight about nothing, absolutely nothing, Gavan. We will—glisser. We will talk about Goya! We will be perfectly comfortable.”

He really believed that they might be, so happily convincing was her tone.

“Grainger is a great chum of yours, isn’t he?” he asked.

“You remember, he and his brother were old playmates; Clarence has turned out a poor creature; he’s a nobody in the church. I’m very fond of Jim. And I admire him tremendously. He is the conquering type, you know—the type that tries for the high grapes.”

“You won’t set him at me, to mangle me for your recreation?”

“Do I seem such a pitiless person?”

“Oh, it would be for my good, of course.”

“You may come with no fear of manglings. You sha’n’t be worried or reformed.”

They had spoken as if the captain were non-existent, but Gavan put the only qualifying touch to his assurance of seeing her at Kirklands. “I’ll come—if I can get there by then.”

XII

UT he did not go to her again in the slums. The final phases of his father’s long illness kept him in Surrey, and he found, on thinking it over, that he was content to rest in the peace of that last seeing of her.

It was clear to him that, were it not for that paralysis of the heart and will, he would have been her lover. Like a veiled, exquisite picture, the impossible love was with him always; he could lift the veil and look upon it with calmness. That he owed something of this calmness to Eppie he well knew. She loved him,—that, too, was evident,—but as a sister might love, perhaps as a mother might. He was her child, her sick child or brother, and he smiled over the simile, well content, and with an odd sense of safety in his assurance. Peace was to be their final word, and in the long months of a still, hot summer, this soft, persistent note of peace was with him and filled a lassitude greater than any he had known.

Monotonously the days went by like darkly freighted boats on a sultry sea—low-lying boats, sliding with the current under sleepy sails.

He watched consciousness fade from his father’s body and found strange, sly analogies (they were like horrid nudges in the dark)—with his mother’s death, the worthless man, the saintly woman, mingling in the sameness of their ending, the pitifulness, after all, of the final insignificance that overtook them both. And so glassy was the current, so sleepy the wind, that the analogy shook hardly a tremor of pain through him.

In the hour of his father’s death, a more trivial memory came—trivial, yet it lent a pathos, even a dignity, to the dying man. In the captain’s eyes, turned wonderingly on him, in the automatic stretching out of his wasted hand for his,—Gavan held it to the end—was the reminiscence of the poor monkey’s far-away death, the little tropical creature that had drooped and died at Kirklands.

On the day of the funeral, Gavan sat in the library at dusk, and the lassitude had become so deep, partly through the breakdown of sheer exhaustion, that the thought of going on watching his own machinery work—toward that same end,—the end of the monkey, of his father, his mother,—was profoundly disgusting.

It was a positively physical disgust, a nausea of fatigue, that had overtaken him as he watched the rooks, above the dark yet gilded woods, wheel against a sunset sky.

Almost automatically, with no sense of choice or effort, he had unlocked a drawer of the writing-table beside him and taken out a case of pistols, merely wondering if the machine were going to take the final and only logical move of stopping itself.

He was a little interested to observe, as he opened the case, that he felt no emotion at all. He had quite expected that at such a last moment life would concentrate, gather itself for a final leap on him, a final clinging. He had expected to have a bout with the elemental, the thing that some men called faith in life and some only desire of life, and, indeed, for a moment, his mind wandered in vague, Buddhistic fancies about the wheel of life to which all desire bound one, desire, the creator of life, so that as long as the individual felt any pulse of it life might always suck him back into the vortex. The fancy gave him his one stir of uneasiness. Suppose that the act of departure were but the final act of will. Could it be that such self-affirmation might tie him still to the wheel he strove to escape, and might the drama still go on for his unwilling spirit in some other dress of flesh? To see the fear as the final bout was to quiet it; it was a fear symptomatic of life, a lure to keep him going; and, besides, how meaningless such surmises, on their ethical basis of voluntary choice, as if in the final decision one would not be, as always, the puppet of the underlying will. His mind dropped from the thread-like interlacing of teasing metaphysical conjecture to a calm as quiet and deep as though he were about to turn on his pillow and fall asleep.

Now, like the visions in a dreamy brain, the memories of the day trooped through the emptiness of thought. He was aware, while he watched the visions, of himself sitting there, to a spectator a tragic or a morbid figure. Morbid was of course the word that a frightened or merely stupid humanity would cast at him. And very morbid he was, to be sure, if life were desirable and to cease to desire it abnormal.

He saw himself no longer in either guise. He was looking now at his father’s coffin lowered into the earth of the little churchyard beside his mother’s grave; the fat, genial face of the sexton, the decorous sadness on the little rector’s features. Overhead had been the quietly stirring elms; sheep grazed beyond the churchyard wall and on the horizon was the pastoral blue of distant hills. He saw the raw, new grave and the heave of the older grave’s green sod, the old stone, with its embroidery of yellow lichen and its text of eternal faith.

And suddenly the thought of that heave of sod, that headstone, what it stood for in his life, the tragic memory, the love, the agony,—all sinking into mere dust, into the same dust as the father whom he had hated,—struck with such unendurable anguish upon him that, as if under heavy churchyard sod a long-dead heart strove up in a tormented resurrection, life rushed appallingly upon him and, involuntarily, as a drowning man’s hand seizes a spar and clings, his hand closed on the pistol under it. Leave it, leave it,—this dream where such resurrections were possible.

He had lifted the pistol, pausing for a moment in an uncertainty as to whether head or heart were the surer exit, when a quiet step at the door arrested him.

“Shall I bring the lamps, sir?” asked Howson’s quiet voice.

Gavan could but admire his own deftness in tossing a newspaper over the pistol. He found himself perfectly prepared to keep up the last appearances. He said that he didn’t want the lamps yet and that Howson could leave the curtains undrawn. “It’s sultry this evening,” he added.

“It is, sir; I expect we’ll have thunder in the night,” said Howson, whose voice partook of the day’s decorous gloom. He had brought in the evening mail and laid the letters and newspapers beside Gavan, slightly pushing aside the covered pistol to make room for them, an action that Gavan observed with some intentness. But Howson saw nothing.

Left alone again, Gavan, not moving in his chair, glanced at the letters and papers neatly piled beside his elbow.

After the rending agony of that moment of hideous realization, when, in every fiber, he had felt his own woeful humanity, an odd sleepiness almost overcame him.

He felt much more like going to sleep than killing himself, and, yawning, stretching, he shivered a little from sheer fatigue.

The edge of the newspaper that covered the pistol was weighted down by the pile of papers, and in putting out his hand for it, automatically, he pushed the letters aside, then, yawning again, picked them up instead of the pistol. He glanced over the envelops, not opening them,—the last hand at cards, that could hold no trumps for him. It was with as mechanical an interest as that of the condemned criminal who, on the way to the scaffold, turns his head to look at some unfamiliar sight. But at the last letter he paused. The post-mark was Scotch; the writing was Eppie’s.

He might have considered at that moment that the shock he felt was a warning that life was by no means done with him, and that his way of safety lay in swift retreat.

But after the wrench of agony and the succeeding sliding languor, he did not consider anything. It was like a purely physical sensation, what he felt, as he held the letter and looked at Eppie’s writing. Soft, recurrent thrills went through him, as though a living, vibrating thing were in his hands. Eppie; Kirklands; the heather under a summer sky. Was it desire, or a will-less drifting with a new current that the new vision brought? He could not have told.

He opened the letter and read Eppie’s matter-of-fact yet delicate sympathy.

He must be worn out. She begged him to remember his promise and to come to them at once.

At once, thought Gavan. It must be that, indeed, or not at all. He glanced at the clock. He could really go at once. He could catch the London train, the night express for Scotland, and he could be at Kirklands at noon next day. He rose and rang the bell, looking out at the darker pink of the sky, where the rooks no longer wheeled, until Howson appeared.

“I’m going to Scotland to-night, at once.” He found himself repeating the summons of the letter. “Pack up my things. Order the trap.”

Howson showed no surprise. A flight from the house of death was only natural.

Gavan, when he was gone, went to the table and closed the box of pistols with a short, decisive snap—a decision in sharp contrast to the mist in which his mind was steeped.

The peace the pistols promised, the peace of the northern sky and the heather: why did he choose the latter? But then he did not choose. Something had chosen for him. Something had called him back. Was it that he was too weary to resist? or did all his strength consist in yielding? He could not have told. Let the play go on. Its next act would be sweet to watch. Of that he was sure.