From the library window Eppie watched him go. She could see for a long time the flicker of his white figure among the distant birches. She sat in a low chair in the deep embrasure of the window-seat, silent and motionless. She felt, after the night’s revelation, an apathy, mental and physical; a willing pause; a lull of the spirit, that rested in its accepted fate, should it be joyful or tragic. The very fact of such acceptance partook of both tragedy and joy. Grainger was with her, walking, as usual, up and down the room, glancing at her as he passed and repassed. He felt, all about him, within and without, the pressure of some crisis; and his ignorance, his intuitions, struggling within him, made a consciousness, oddly mingled, of sharp pain, deep dread, and, superficially, a suffocating irritation, continually rising and continually repressed. Eppie’s aspect intensified the mingled consciousness. Her figure, in its thin dress of black and white, showed lassitude. With her head thrown back against the chair, her hands, long, white, inert, lying along the chair-arms, she looked out from the cool shadow of the room at the day, fierce in its blue and gold, its sunlight and its wind. He had seen Gavan pass, so strangely alone; he had watched her watching of him. She was languid; but she was patient, she was strong. That was part of the suffocation, that such strength, such patience, should be devoted to ends so undeserving. More than by mere jealousy, though that seethed in him, he was oppressed by the bitter sense of waste, of the futile spending of noble capacity; for, more than all, she was piteous; there came the part of pain and dread, the presage of doom that weighed on his heart. In her still figure, her steady look out at the empty, splendid vault of blue, the monotonous purple stretches of the moor, his unesthetic, accurate mind felt, with the sharp intuition that carried him so much further than any conscious appreciation, a symbol of the human soul contemplating the ominous enigma of its destiny. She made him dimly think of some old picture he had seen, a saint, courageous, calm, enraptured, in the luminous pause before a dark, accepted martyrdom. He did violence to the simile, shaking it off vehemently, with a clutch at the sane impatience of silly fancies. Stopping abruptly before her, though hardly knowing for what end, he found himself saying, and the decisive words, as he heard, rather than thought them, had indeed the effect of shattering foolish visions, “I shall go to-day, Eppie.” In seeing her startled, pained, expostulatory, he saw her again, very sanely, as an unfortunate woman bent on doing for herself and unable to hide her situation from his keen-sightedness. For really he didn’t know whether a hopeless love-affair or a hopeless marriage would the more completely “do” for her. “My dear Jim, why to-day?” Eppie asked in a tone of kindest protest.