“You caress me, you try to comfort me,--while I am tormenting you. It’s strange that I should want to torment you. Is it that I’m so afraid you sha’n’t feel? I want you to feel. I want you to suffer. It is so horrible to leave you. It is so horrible to be afraid--sometimes afraid--that I shall never, never see you again. When you feel, when you suffer, I am not so lonely. But you feel nothing, do you?” He did not answer her. “Will you ever miss me, Gavan?” He did not answer. “Won’t you even remember me?” she asked. And still he did not answer, sitting with downcast eyes. And she saw that he could not, and in his silence, of a dumb torture, was his reply. He looked the stricken saint, pierced through with arrows. And which of them was the victim, which the executioner? With her question a clearness, quieter, deeper, came to her, as though in the recoil of its engulfing anguish she pushed her way from among vibrating discords to a sudden harmony that, in holy peace, resolved them all in unison. Her eyelids fluttered down while, for an instant, she listened. Yes, under it all, above it all, holding them all about, there it was. She seemed to see the pain mounting, circling, flowing from its knotted root into strength and splendor. But though he was with her in it he was also far away,--he was blind, and deaf,--held fast by cruel bonds. “Look at me,” she commanded him gently. And now, reluctantly, he looked up into her eyes. They held him, they drew him, they flooded him. With the keenness of life they cut into his heart, and like the surging up of blood his love answered hers. As helpless as he had ever been before her, he laid his head on her breast, his arms encircling her, while, with closed eyes, he said: “Don’t think that I don’t feel. Don’t think that I don’t suffer. It’s only that;--I have only to see you;--something grasps me, and tortures me--“ “Something,” she said, her voice like the far flute echo of the voice that had spoken on that night in the old Scotch garden, “that brings you to life--to God.” “Oh, Eppie, what can I say to you?” he murmured. “You can say nothing. But you will have to wake. It will have to come,--the sorrow, the joy of reality,--God--and me.” It was his face, with closed eyes, with its stricken, ashen agony, that seemed the dying face. Hers, turned gently toward him, had all the beneficence, the radiance of life. But when she spoke again there was in her voice a tranced stillness as though already it spoke from another world. “You love me, Gavan.” “I love you. You have that. That is yours, forever. I long for you, always, always,--even when I think that I am at peace. You are in everything: I hear a bird, and I think of your voice; I see a flower, or the sky, and it’s of your face I think. I am yours, Eppie--yours forever.” “You make me happy,” she said. “Eppie, my darling Eppie, die now, die in my arms, dearest--in your happiness.”