When the dawn slowly stole into the garden, so that the ghosts of day began to take shape and color, Gavan rose among them. The earth was damp with dew; his hair and clothes were damp. Overhead the sky was white, and the hills upon it showed a flat, shadowless green. Between the night’s enchantments of stillness, starriness, veiled, dreaming beauty and the sunlit, voluble enchantments of the day,--songs and flights of birds, ripple and shine of water, the fugitive, changing color of land and sky,--this hour was poor, bare, monotonous. There wasn’t a ray of enchantment in it. It was like bleak canvas scenery waiting for the footlights and a decorated stage. Gavan looked before him, down the garden path, shivering a little. He was cold, and the sensation brought him back to the old fact of life, that, after all, was there as long as one saw it. The coming of the light seemed to retwist once more his own palely tinted prism of personality, and with the cold, with the conscious looking back at the night and forward to the day, came a long, dull ache of sadness. It was more physical than mental; hunger and chill played their part in it, he knew, while, as the prism twined its colors, the fatiguing faculty of analysis once more built up the world of change and diversity. He looked up at the pale walls of the old house, laced with their pattern of creepers. The pine-tree lay like an inky shadow across it, and, among the branches, were the windows of Eppie’s room, the window where he and she had stood together on the morning of Robbie’s death--a white, dew-drenched morning like this. There she slept, dear, beautiful, the shadow of life. And here he stood, still living, after all, in their mutual mirage; still to hurt her. He didn’t think of her face, her voice, her aspect. The only image that came was of a shadow--something darkly beautiful that entranced and suffocated, something that, enveloping one, shut out peace and vacancy. His cold hands thrust into his pockets, he stood thinking for a moment, of how he would have to hurt her, and of how much less it was to be than if what they had seen in the night’s glamour had been possible. He wondered why the mere fact of the night’s revelation--all those passing-bell hours--had made it so impossible for him to go on, by sheer force of will, with the play. Why couldn’t he, for her sake, act the lifelong part? In her arms he would know again the moments of glamour. But, at the mere question, a sickness shuddered through him. He saw now, clearly, what stood in the way: suffering, hideous suffering, for both of them--permanent, all-pervading suffering. The night had proved too irrevocably that any union between them was only momentary, only a seeming, and with her, feeling her faith, her hope, her love, he could know nothing but the undurable discord of their united and warring notes. Could life and death be made one flesh?