She was kind; she hoped he would still come and see them; she talked, and her voice was far away and irrelevant. He left her. He was like a man who has been robbed of his all and knows he will never get it back, by any artifice or any force. On Sunday he went to Eileen. It seemed about a month ago that he had heard from Bridget asking him to do so. He found her listless and heavy-eyed, and yawning from lack of sleep. Gently he led her to talk, till Hugh Datcherd seemed to stand alive in the room, caressed by their allusions. He told her of people who missed him; quoted what working-men of the Settlement had said of him; discussed his work. She woke from apathy. It was as if, among a world that, meaning kindness, bade her forget, this one voice bade her remember, and remembered with her; as if, among many voices that softened over his name as with pity for sadness and failure, this one voice rang glorying in his success. Sheer intuition had told Eddy that that was what she wanted, what she was sick for--some recognition, some triumph for him whose gifts had seemed to be broken and wasted, whose life had set in the greyness of unsuccess. As far as one man could give her what she wanted, he gave it, with both hands, and so she clung to him out of all the kind, uncomprehending world. They talked far into the grey afternoon. And she grew better. She grew so much better that she said to him suddenly, “You look tired to death, do you know. What have you been doing to yourself?” With the question and her concerned eyes, the need came to him in his turn for sympathy. “I’ve been doing nothing. Molly has. She has broken off our engagement.” “Do you say so?” She was startled, sorry, pitiful. She forgot her own grief. “My dear--and I bothering you with my own things and never seeing how it was with you! How good you’ve been to me, Eddy. I wonder is there anyone else in the world would be so patient and so kind. Oh, but I’m sorry.” She asked no questions, and he did not tell her much. But to talk of it was good for both of them. She tried to give him back some of the sympathy she had had of him; she was only partly successful, being still half numbed and bound by her own sorrow; but the effort a little loosened the bands. And part of him watched their loosening with interest, as a doctor watches a patient’s first motions of returning health, while the other part found relief in talking to her. It was a strange, half selfish, half unselfish afternoon they both had, and a little light crept in through the fogs that brooded about both of them. Eileen said as he went, “It’s been dear of you to come like this.... I’m going to spend next Sunday at Holmbury St. Mary. If you’re doing nothing else, I wish you’d come there too, and we’ll spend the day tramping.”