He was glad to have drawn her down to the solid ground of his own grievances. She hurt him less there. “Why not to-day?” he retorted. She replied that, if for no better reason, the weather was too lovely not to be enjoyed by them all together. “Thanks, but I don’t care about the weather. Nor do I care,” Grainger went on, taking the sorry comfort that his own mere ill-temper afforded him, “to watch other people’s enjoyment--of more than weather. I’m not made of such selfless stuff as that.” She understood, of course; perhaps she had all along understood what he was feeling more clearly than clumsy he had, and she met all that was beneath the mannerless words with her air of sad kindliness. “You can share it, Jim.” “No, I can’t share it. I share nothing--except the weather.” She murmured, as she had the night before, that she was sorry, adding that she must have failed; but he interrupted her with: “It’s not that. You are all right. You give me all you can. It’s merely that you can’t give me anything I want. I came to see if there was any chance for me, and all I do see is that I may as well be off. I do myself no good by staying on,--harm, rather; you may begin to resent my sulkiness and my boorish relapses from even rudimentary good manners.” “I have resented nothing, Jim. I can’t imagine ever resenting anything--from you.” “Ah, that’s just the worst of it,” Grainger muttered. “For your own sake,” Eppie went on, “you are perhaps wise to go. I own that I can’t see what happiness you can find in being with me, while you feel as you do.” “While I feel as I do,” he repeated, not ironically, but as if weighing the words in a sort of wonder. “That ‘while’ is funny, Eppie. You are right. I don’t find happiness, and I came to seek it.” The “while” had cut deep. He paused, then added, eying her, “So I’ll go, and leave Palairet to find the happiness.” Eppie was silent. Paler than before, her eyes dropped, she seemed to accept with a helpless magnanimity whatever he might choose to say. “You find me impertinent,”--Grainger, standing before her, clutched his arms across his chest and put his own thought of himself into the words,--“brutal.” Without looking up at him she answered: “I am so fond of you, so near you, that I suppose I give you the right.” The patient words, so unlike Eppie in their patience, the downcast eyes, were a torch to his exasperation. “I can take it, then--the right?” he said. “I am near enough to say the truth and to ask it, Eppie?” She rose and walked away from him.