This monkish understanding of the snares of life was quite untouched by monkish reprobation; even the sense of resentment had faded. And it spoke much for the long training of his thought in the dissecting and destroying of transitory desires that he was presently able to contemplate his loss--as he still must absurdly term it--with an icy tranquillity. A breathlessness, as from some drastic surgical operation, was beneath it, but that was of the nature of a mere physical symptom, destined to readjust itself to lopped conditions; and with the full turning of his mind from himself came the fuller realization of how well it was with Eppie and a cold, acquiescent peace that, in his nature, was the equivalent for an upwelling of religious gratitude, for her salvation. But the stress of the whole strange seizure, wrench and renouncement had told on him mentally and physically. Every atom of his being, as if from some violent concussion, seemed altered, shifted. The change was in his face when, in the closing dusk of the day, he went down to the library. It was not steeled to the hearing of the news that must await him: such tension of endurance had passed swiftly into his habitual ease; but a look of death had crossed and marked it. It looked like a still, drowned face, sinking under deep waters, and Eppie, in her low chair near the window, where she had sat for many hours, saw in his eyes the awful, passionless detachment from life. After his pause at the unexpected sight of her, sitting there alone, a pause in which she did not speak, although he saw that her eyes were on him, he went on softly down the room, glancing out at each window as he passed it; and he looked, as he went, like an evening moth, drifting, aimless, uncanny. Outside, the moor stretched like a heavily sighing ocean, desolate and dark, to the horizon where, from behind the huge rim of the world, the sun’s dim glow, a gloomy, ominous red, mounted far into the sky. Within the room, a soft, magical color pervaded the dusk, touching Eppie’s hair, her hands, the vague folds and fallings of her dress. He waited for her to speak, though it seemed perfectly fitting that neither should. In the silence, the sadness of this radiant gloom, they needed no words to make more clear the accepted separation, and the silence, the sadness, were like a bleeding to quiet, desired death. The day was dying, and the instable, impossible love was dying, too. She had let go, and he quietly sank. But when she spoke her words were like sharp air cutting into drowned lungs. “I saw you pass this afternoon, Gavan.” From the farthest window, where he had paused, he turned to her. “Did you, Eppie?” “Didn’t you see that I did?” “I wasn’t sure.” He heard the flavor of helplessness in his own voice and felt in her a hard hostility, pleased to play with his helplessness.