“Why did you not speak of what you saw?” Her anger against him was almost like a palpable presence between them in the dark, glowing room. He began to feel that through some ugly blunder he was very much at her mercy, and that, for the first time, he should find little mercy in her; and, for the first time, too, a quick hostility rose in him to answer hers. It was as if he had tasted too deeply of release; all his strength was with him to fight off the threat of the returning grasp. “Why should I?” he asked, letting her see in his gaze at her that just such a hard placidity would meet any interpretation she chose to give. “Didn’t you care to understand?” “I thought that I did understand.” “What did you think, then?” Eppie asked. He had to give her the helpless answer. “That you had accepted him.” He knew, now, that she hadn’t, and that for him to have thought so was to have cruelly wronged her; and she took it in a long silence, as though she must give herself time to see it clearly, to adjust herself to it and to all that it meant--in him, for her. What it meant, in her and for him, was filling his thoughts with a dizzy enough whirl of readjustment, and there mingled with it a strange after-flavor of the jealousy, and of the resentment against her; for, after all, though he had probably now an added reason for considering himself a warped wretch, there had been some reason for his mistake: if she hadn’t accepted him, why had he seen her so? “Jim is gone,” she said at last. “Because--It was unwillingly, then?” The full flame of her scorn blazed out at that, but he felt, like an echo of tears in himself, that she would have burst into tears of wretchedness if she had not been able so to scorn him. “Unwillingly! Why should you think him insolent and me helpless? Can you conceive of nothing noble?” she said. “I am sorry, Eppie. I have been stupid.” “You have--more than stupid. He was going and he asked me for that. And I gave it--proudly.” “I am sorry,” Gavan repeated. “I see, of course. Of course it was noble.” “You should be more than sorry. You knew that I did not love him.” “I am more than sorry. I am ashamed,” he answered gravely. He had the dignity of full contrition; but under it, unshaken after all, was the repudiation of the nearness that her explanation revealed. His heart throbbed heavily, for he saw, as never before, how near it was; yet he had never feared her less. He had learned too much that afternoon to fear her. He was sure of his power to save her from what he had so fully learned. He looked away from her and for long out at the ebbing red, and it was the unshaken resolve that spoke at last. “But all the same I am sorry that it was only that. He would have made you happy.” “You knew that I did not love him,” Eppie repeated.