“I didn’t exactly mean it literally,--not a real forest, perhaps.” He had looked away from her, and, his thin, white face sunken among the heather, his eyes were on the blue immensities where her thoughts had lost themselves. “I am so often frightened. I get so lost sometimes that I can hardly believe that that Some One is near me. And then the fear becomes a sort of numbness, so that I hardly seem there myself; it’s only loneliness, while I melt and melt away into nothing. Even now, when I look at that sky, the feeling creeps and creeps, that dreadful loneliness, where there isn’t any I left to know that it’s lonely--only a feeling.” He shut his eyes resolutely. “My mother always says that it is when one has such fancies that one must pray and have faith.” Eppie hardly felt that he spoke to her, and she groped among his strange thoughts, seizing the most concrete of them, imitating his shutting out of the emptiness by closing her own eyes. “Yes,” she said, reflecting in the odd, glowing dimness, “I am quite sure that you have much more feeling about God when you think hard, inside yourself, than when you look at the sky.” “Only then, there are chasms inside, too.” Gavan’s hand beside him was once more restlessly pulling at the heather. “Even inside, one can fall, and fall, and fall.” The strange tone of his voice--it was indeed like the far note of a falling bell, dying in an abyss--roused Eppie from her experiments. She shook his shoulder. “Open your eyes, Gavan; please, at once. You make me feel horridly. I would rather have you look at the sky than fall inside like that.” He raised himself on an arm now, with a gaze, for a moment, vague, deadened, blank, then sprang to his feet. “Don’t let’s look. Don’t let’s fall. We must pray and have faith. Eppie, I have made you so pale. Dear Eppie, to care so much. Please forgive me for going to pieces like that.” Eppie was on her feet, too. “But I want you to. You know what I mean: never hide things. Oh, Gavan, if I could only help you.” “You do. It is because you care, just in the way you do, that I _could_ go to pieces,--and it has helped me to be so selfish.” “Please be selfish, often, often, then. I always am caring. And just wait till I am grown up. I shall do something for you then. _I’ll_ make money, too, Gavan.” “Eppie, you are the dearest little girl,” he repeated, in a shaken voice; and at that she put her arms around his neck and kissed him. The boy’s eyes filled with tears. They stood under the sighing pines, high in the blue, and the scent of the heather was strong, sweet, in the sunny air. Gavan did not return the kiss, but holding her face between his hands, stammering, he said, “Eppie, how can I bear ever to leave you?” V