The still, hot day encompassed their shadow and with its quiet made more intense Grainger’s sense of his own passion--passion and its negation, the stress between the two. Their words, though they spoke so quietly, seemed to fill the world. “I am sorry,” Gavan said; “I can do nothing.” Grainger beat at the tree. “You love her.” “Not as she must be loved. I only want her, when I am selfish. When I think for her I have no want at all.” “Give her your selfishness.” “Ah, even that fades. That’s what I found out. I can’t count on my selfishness. I’ve tried to do it. It didn’t work.” Grainger turned his bloodshot eyes upon him; these moments under the yew-tree, that white figure with its pale smile, its comprehending gravity confronting him, would count in his life, he knew, among its most racking memories. “I consider you a madman,” he now said. “Perhaps I am one. You don’t think it for Eppie’s happiness to marry a madman?” “My God, I don’t know what to think! I want to save her.” “But so do I,” Gavan’s voice had its first note of eagerness. “_I_ want to save her. And I want her to marry you. That’s her chance, and yours--and mine, though mine really doesn’t count. That’s what I hope for.” “There’s no hope there.” “Have patience. Wait. She will, perhaps, get over me.” Grainger’s eyes, with their hot, jaded look of baffled purpose, so selfless that it transcended jealousy and hatred, were still on him, and he thought now that he detected on the other’s face the strain of some inner tension. He wasn’t so dead, then. He was suffering. No, more yet, and the final insight came in another vague flash that darkly showed the trouble at the heart of all the magic, the beauty, he, too, more really than Eppie, perhaps, was dying for love. Madman, devoted madman that he was, he was dying for love of the woman from whom he must always flee. It was strange to feel one’s sane, straightforward mind forced along this labyrinth of dazed comprehension, turning in the cruelly knotted paradox of this impossible love-story. Yet, against his very will, he was so forced to follow and almost to understand. There wasn’t much more to say. And he had his own paradoxical satisfaction in the sight of the canker at the core of thought. So, at all events, one wasn’t safe even so. “She won’t get over you,” he said. “It isn’t a mere love-affair. It’s her life. She may not die of it; that’s a figure of speech that I had no right, I suppose, to use. At all events, she’ll try her best not to die. But she won’t get over you.” “Not even if I get out of the way forever?” Gavan put the final proposition before him, but Grainger, staring at the sunlight, shook his head. “The very fact that you’re alive makes her hold the tighter. No, you can’t save her in that way. I wish you could.” X Grainger had had his insight, but, outwardly, in the year that followed, Gavan’s life was one of peace, of achieved escape.