“I could hardly live if I thought that you were going to love him in eternity and that I was, forever, to be shut away. Thank goodness that it’s only for a lifetime that my tragedy lasts.” She closed her eyes to these perplexities, laying her hand on his. “I don’t know. We can only think and act for this life. It’s this we have to shape. Perhaps in eternity, really in eternity, whatever that may mean, I won’t need to shut you out. Dear, dear Jim, it’s hard that it must seem that to you now. You know what I feel about you. And who could feel it as I do? We are in the same boat.” “No, for he, at least, loves no one else. You haven’t that to bear. As far as he goes,--and it isn’t far,--he is yours. We are not at all in the same boat. But that’s enough of me. I suppose I am done for, as you say, forever.” He had got upon his feet, and, as if at their mutual wreckage, looked down with a face that had found again its old shield of grimness. “As for you,” he went on, “I sha’n’t, at all events, see you suffocating. You must mend alone, then, as best you can. Really, you’re not as tragic as you might have been.” Then, after this salutary harshness, and before he turned from her to go, he added, as once before, “Poor darling.” IX Grainger hardly knew why he had come and, as he walked up the deep Surrey lane from the drowsy village station, his common-sense warred with the instinct, almost the obsession, that was taking him to Cheylesford Lodge. Eppie had been persistently in his thoughts since their meeting of the week before, and from his own hopelessness had sprung the haunting of a hope for her. Turn from it as he would, accuse himself angrily of madness, morbidity, or a mere tendency to outrageous meddling,--symptomatic of shattered nerves,--he couldn’t escape it. By day and night it was with him, until he saw himself, in a lurid vision, as responsible for Eppie’s very life if he didn’t test its validity. For where she had failed might not a man armed with the strength of his selfless love succeed?