The general retold his favorite anecdotes with shorter intervals between the tellings; cared more openly, with an innocent greediness, about the exactitudes of his diet; was content to sit idly with an unremembering, indifferent benignancy of gaze. All the sturdier significances of life were fast slipping from him, all the old martial activities; it was like seeing the undressing of a child, the laying aside of the toy trumpet and the soldier’s kilt preparatory to bed. Miss Barbara was sweeter than ever--a sweetness even less touched with variations than last year. And she was sillier, poor old darling; her laugh had in it at moments the tinkling, feeble foolishness of age. Gavan saw it all imperturbably--how, in boyhood, the apprehension of it would have cut into him!--and it all seemed really very good--as the furniture to a fairy-tale; the sweet, dim, silly tapestry was part of the peace. How Eppie saw it he didn’t know; he didn’t care; and she seemed willing not to care, either, about what he saw or thought. Eppie had for him in their fairy-tale all the unexacting loveliness of summer nature, healing, sunny, smiling. He had been really ill, he knew that now, and that the peace was in part the languor of convalescence, and, for the sake of his recovery, she seemed to have become a part of nature, to ask no questions and demand no dues. To have her so near, so tender, so untroubling, was like holding in his hands a soft, contented wild bird. He could, he thought, have held it against his heart, and the heart would not have throbbed the faster. There was nothing in her now of the young Valkyrie of mists and frosts, shaking spears and facing tragedy with stern eyes. She threatened nothing. She saw no tragedy. It was all again as if, in a bigger, more beautiful way, she gave him milk to drink from a silver cup. Together they drank, no potion, no enchanted, perilous potion, but, from the cup of innocent summer days, the long, sweet dream of an Eternal Now. To-day, for the first time, the hint of a cloud had crept into the sky. “And to-morrow, Eppie, ends our tête-à-tête,” he said. “Or will Grainger make as little of a third as the general and Miss Barbara?” “He sha’n’t spoil things, if that’s what you mean,” said Eppie. She wore a white dress and a white hat wreathed with green; the emerald drops trembled in the shadow of her hair. She made him think of some wandering princess in an Irish legend, with the white and green and the tranquil shining of her eyes. “Not our things, perhaps; but can’t he interfere with them? He will want to talk with you about all the things we go on so happily without talking of.” “I’ll talk to him and go on happily with you.”