Grainger’s presence, for all its ineffectuality, thus witnessed to by Miss Barbara, was as menacing to peace and sunshine as a huge thunder-cloud that suddenly heaves itself up from the horizon and hangs over a darkened landscape. But Eppie ignored the thunder-cloud; and, hanging over fairy-land, it became as merely decorative as an enchanted giant tethered at a safe distance and almost amusing in his huge helplessness. Eppie continued to give most of her time to Gavan, coloring her manner with something of a hospital nurse’s air of devotion to an obvious duty, and leaving Grainger largely to the general’s care while she and Gavan sat reading for hours in the shade of the birch-woods. Grainger often came upon them so; Eppie in her white dress, her hat cast aside, a book open upon her knees, and Gavan, in his white flannels, lying beside her, frail and emaciated, not looking at her,--Grainger seldom saw him look at her,--but down at the heather that he softly pulled and wrenched at. They were as beautiful, seen thus together, as any fairy-tale couple; flakes of gold wavering over their whiteness, the golden day all about their illumined shade, and rivulets from the sea of purple that surrounded them running in among the birches, making purple pools and eddies. Very beautiful, very strange, very pathetic, with all their serenity; even the unimaginative Grainger so felt them when, emerging from the gold and purple, he would pause before them, swinging his stick and eying them oddly, like people in a fairy-tale upon whom some strange enchantment rested. One might imagine--but Grainger’s imagination never took him so far--that they would always sit there among the birches, spellbound in their peace, their smiling, magic peace. “Come and listen to Faust, Jim. We are polishing up our German,” Eppie would cheerfully suggest; but Grainger, remarking that he had none to polish, would pass on, carrying the memory of Gavan’s impassive, upward glance at him and the meaning in Eppie’s eyes--eyes in which, yes, he was sure of it, and it was there he felt the pathos, some consciousness seemed at once to hide from and to challenge him. “Is he ill, your young Palairet?” he asked her one day, when they were alone together in the library. His rare references to his own emotions made the old, cousinly intimacy a frequent meeting-ground. He noticed that a faint color drifted into Eppie’s cheek when he named Gavan. “He is as old as you are, Jim,” she remarked. “He looks like a person to be taken care of, all the same.” “He has been ill. He took care of some one else, as it happens. He nursed his father for months.” “Um,” Grainger gave an inarticulate grunt, “just about what he’s fit for, isn’t it? to help dying people out of the world.” Eppie received this in silence, and he went on: “He looks rather like a priest, or a poet--something decorative and useless.” “Would you call Buddha decorative and useless?”