His condition was so obvious that its very indifference to observation took everybody into its confidence. Nobody counted with Mr. Grainger except his cousin, and since he held open before her eyes--with angry constancy, gloomy patience--the page of his devotion, the rest of the company were almost forced to read with her. One couldn’t see Mr. Grainger without seeing that page. He held it open, but the period of construing had evidently passed. All that there was to understand she understood long since, so that he was, for the most part, silent. In Eppie’s presence he would wander aimlessly about, look with an oddly irate, unseeing eye at books or pictures, and fling himself into deep chairs, where he sat, his arms folded in a sort of clutch, his head bent forward, gazing at her with an air of dogged, somber resolve. He was not by nature so taciturn. It was amusing to see the vehemence of reaction that would overtake him in the smoking-room, where his volubility became almost as overbearing and oppressive as his silences. He was a man at once impatient and self-controlled. His face was all made up of short, resolute lines. His nose, chopped off at the tip; his lips, curled yet compressed; the energetic modeling of his brows with their muscular protuberances; the clefted chin; the crest of chestnut hair,--all expressed a wilful abruptness, an arrested force, the more vehement for its repression. And at present his appearance accurately expressed him as a determined but exasperated lover. “Of course,” Miss Barbara said, in whispered confidence to Gavan, mingled pity and reprobation in her voice, “as her cousin he comes when he wishes to do so. But she has refused him twice already--he told me so himself; and, simply, he will not accept it. He only spoke of it once, and it was quite distressing. It really grieved me to hear him. He said that he would hang on till one or the other of them was dead.” Grainger’s words in Miss Barbara’s voice were the more pathetic for their incongruity. “And you don’t think she will have him,--if he does hang on?” Gavan asked. Miss Barbara glanced at him with a soft, scared look, as though his easy, colloquial question had turned a tawdry light on some tender, twilight dreaming of her own. He had wondered, anew of late, what Miss Barbara did think about him and Eppie, and what she had thought he now saw in her eyes, that showed their little shock, as at some rather graceless piece of pretence. He was quite willing that she should think him pretending, and quite willing that she should place him in Grainger’s hopeless category, if future events would be most easily so interpreted for her; so that he remained silent, as if over his relief, when she assured him, “Oh, I am sure not. Eppie does not change her mind.”