Molly said consolingly, “Don’t you mind, Eddy. She doesn’t really. She only pretends to, for fun. She knows it wasn’t your fault. Of course you had to take your friend home if she wasn’t well.” “I couldn’t have left her, as a matter of fact. She was frightfully unhappy and unhinged.... It was Mrs. Le Moine.” He conquered a vague reluctance and added this. He was not going to have the vestige of a secret from Molly. She flushed quickly and said nothing, and he knew that he had hurt her. Yet it was an unthinkable alternative to conceal the truth from her; equally unthinkable not to do these things that hurt her. What then, would be the solution? Simply he did not know. A change of attitude on her part seemed to him the only possible one, and he had waited now long for that in vain. To avert her sombreness and his, he began to talk cheerfully to her about all manner of things, and she responded, but not quite spontaneously. A shadow lay between them. So obvious was it that after dinner he told her so, in those words. She tried to smile. “Does it? How silly you are.” “You’d better tell me the worst, you know. You think it was ill-bred of me to be late for dinner.” “What rubbish; I don’t. As if you could help it.” But he knew she thought he could have helped it. So they left it at that, and the shadow remained. Eddy, it may have been mentioned, had the gift of sympathy largely developed--the quality of his defect of impressionability. He had it more than is customary. People found that he said and felt the most consoling thing, and left unsaid the less. It was because he found realisation easy. So people in trouble often came to him. Eileen Le Moine, reaching out in her desperate need on the mist-bound marshes, had, as it were, met the saving grasp of his hand. Half-consciously she had let it draw her out of the deep waters where she was sinking, on to the shores of sanity. She reached out to him again. He had cared for Hugh; he cared for her; he understood how nothing in heaven and earth now mattered; he did not try to give her interests; he simply gave her his sorrow and understanding and his admiration of Hugh. So she claimed it, as a drowning man clutches instinctively at the thing which will best support him. And as she claimed he gave. He gave of his best. He tried to make Molly give too, but she would not. There came a day when Bridget Hogan wrote and said that she had to go out of town for Sunday, and didn’t want to leave Eileen alone in the flat all day, and would Eddy come and see her there--come to lunch, perhaps, and stay for the afternoon. “You are good for her; better than anyone else, I think,” Bridget wrote. “She feels she can talk about Hugh to you, though to hardly anyone--not even to me much. I am anxious about her just now. Please do come if you can.”