For a long time he was silent, only pressing closely to her as though to hide himself from her questions--from his own thoughts. He said at last: “I can’t think, Eppie. Your words go like birds over my head. Your suffering, my longing, hurt me; but it’s like the memory of a hurt. I am apart from it, even while I feel it. Even while I love you--oh, Eppie! Eppie!--I don’t care. But when we are like this--at last like this--I am caught back into it all, all that I thought I’d got over forever, this afternoon,--all the dreadful dream--the beautiful dream. It’s for this I’ve longed--you have known it: to hold you, to feel your breath on me, to dream with you. How beautiful you are, how sweet! Kiss me, Eppie,--darling, darling Eppie!” “I will not kiss you. It would be real to me.” He had raised his head and was seeing now the suffering of her shadowy eyes, the shadowy lips she refused him tragically compressed lest they should tremble. Behind her pale head and its heavy cloud of hair were the white roses giving out--how his mind reeled with the memory of it--the old, sweet, wine-like fragrance. He closed his eyes to the vision, bending his lips to her hand, saying: “Yes, that’s why I wanted to spare you--wanted to run away.” In the little distance now of his drawing from her, even while he still held her, his cheek on her hand, she could speak more easily. “It is that that enrages me,--your mystic sickness. I am awake, but you aren’t even dreaming. You are drugged--drugged with thought not strong enough to find its real end. You have paralyzed yourself. No argument could cure you. No thought could cure you. Only life could cure you. You must get life, and to get it you must want it.” “I don’t want it. I can’t want it. I only want you,” said Gavan, with such a different echo. She understood, more fully than he, perhaps, the helpless words. Above his bowed head, her face set, she looked out into the night. Her mind measured, coldly it seemed to her, the strength of her own faith and of his negation. Her love, including but so far transcending all natural cravings, had its proud recoil from the abasement--oh, she saw it all!--that his limitation would bring to it. Yet, like the mother again, adapting truth to the child’s dim apprehension, leading it on by symbols, she brooded over her deep thoughts of redemption and looked clearly at all dangers and all hopes. Faith must face even his unspiritual seeing. Faith must endure his worse than pagan love. Bound to her by every natural tie, her strength must lift him, through them, to their spiritual aspect, to their reality. Life was her ally. She must put her trust in life. She consecrated herself to it anew. Let it lead her where it would. The long moment of steady forecast had, after its agony of shame and fear, its triumph over both.