At this point she was aroused by voices, and along the little path through the trees, she descried Eileen and Lawrence coming toward her. “Lawrence was just telling me about his trip,” Eileen said pleasantly. “He is going to have a splendid tour. I think he is very wise to go about and see the world while he can, don’t you?” Paddy did not answer, and somehow Lawrence carefully avoided meeting her eyes. Eileen’s pluck was making him feel less pleased with himself than anything else could have done. They had met accidentally in the afternoon, and she had immediately, in a charming way, congratulated him upon his good fortune in being able to start off travelling again. He had been a little surprised and a little chagrined, but he had been nearer loving her then, than ever before. Paddy’s quick eyes saw at once how matters stood, and she followed Eileen’s lead. Thus for the present, Eileen managed to blind the loving, watchful eyes of the home circle. Only to her beloved mountains, and that distant strip of turquoise, which was the sea, she remained still herself and hid nothing. In her lonely little nook, high up on the mountain side, with the dear wonder of loveliness that she so loved, spread out around her, she passed through the first of those weary Gethsemanes, that sap the joy out of young lives for a season. At first it was so incredible to her. Had he not looked his love so often!—shown it in so many ways!—done everything, in fact, except confessed it! And if it were all a mistake, if he had meant none of it, how base then he must be. This hurt her the most. She had never idealised him, she had rigidly made herself see his failings, but because she had believed them only the result of past circumstances and companions, and believed his love would soon lift him above them, she had given him of her best in spite of all. But now everything was changed. Of a surety he did not love her. Sometimes, remembering a passage here and a passage there—a look here, a look there—a touch, a tone, a sentence—her whole soul rose up and cried: “It is false, it is a mistake, he does love me, oh! he does—he does—he does—” There would be a short space of passionate hope, and then calm reason would step in and say with inexorable firmness: “How can that be, since he goes away for no particular reason to the other side of the world, when everything at home needs his presence?” Then would follow a period of terrible self-depreciation, when poor Eileen’s sensitive nature shrank back horrified from the thought of all she had given unasked—and her cheeks burned with a deep sense of shame that she had allowed herself to believe in love where apparently no love was.