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.