Far away, on the horizon, in the gloomy waste of embers, the sun’s deep core still burned, and in his heart was a deep fatigue, like the sky’s slow smoldering to gray. VI Grainger had gone, and Gavan announced his departure for the next morning. The situation was simplified, he felt, by Eppie’s somber preoccupation. He was very willing that she should be seen as a gloomy taker of scalps and that his own should be supposed to be hanging at her girdle. The resultant muteness and melancholy in the general and Miss Barbara were really a comfort. The dear old figures in the tapestry seemed fading to-night into mere plaintive shadows, fixing eyes of sad but unquestioning contemplation upon the latent tragedies of the foreground figures. It was a comfort to have the tapestry so reticent and so submissive, but, all the same, it made the foreground tragedy, for his eyes, painfully distinct. He could look at nothing else. Eppie seemed to stand, with her broken and bleeding heart, in the very center of the design. For the first time he saw what the design was--saw all of it, from the dim reaches of the past, as working to this end. The weaving of fate was accomplished. There she stood, suffering, speechless, and he, looking at her, fatal shuttle of her doom that he was, felt under all the ashes a dull throbbing. After dinner he smoked a cigar with the general, who, tactfully, as to one obviously maimed, spoke only of distant and impersonal matters. Gavan left him over some papers in the quiet light of the smoking-room and went to the library. Eppie, with her broken heart, was not there. The night was very hot. By an open window Miss Barbara sat dozing, her hands upturned with an appealing laxity on her knees, sad even in her sleep. Eppie was not there and she had not spoken one word to him since those last words of the afternoon. Perhaps she intended to speak no more, to see him no more. Pausing on the threshold, he was now conscious of a slow, rising misery. If he was to be spared the final wrench, he was also to be robbed of something. He hadn’t known, till then, of how much. He hadn’t known, while she stood there before him, this fully revealed Eppie, this Eppie who loved far beyond his imagining, far beyond prudence, ambition, even happiness, what it would be not to see her again, to part from her speechlessly, and with a sort of enmity unresolved between them. The cathedral simile was still with him, not in her interpretation of it, as the consecration of human love, but in his own, as a place of peace, where together they might still kneel in farewell. But she barred him out from that; she wouldn’t accept such peace. He could only submit and own that she was perhaps altogether right in risking no more battles and in proudly denying to him the opportunity of any reconciling. She was right to have it end there; but the core among the embers ached. He wandered out into the dark, vague night, sorrowfully restless.