“But it’s Robbie in his body that we want. It’s his body, with Robbie in it, that we know. God has done with wanting him--that’s it, perhaps; but we want him. Oh, Eppie, it’s no good: as we know him, as we want him, he is dead--dead forever. Besides,”--in speaking this Gavan straightened himself,--“we shall forget him.” He turned, in speaking, from her consolations, as though their inefficiency hurt him. “I won’t forget him,” said Eppie. Gavan made no reply. He had risen, and standing now at the widely opened window, looked out over the chill, misty dawn. Beneath was the garden, its golden-gray walls rippling with green traceries, the clotted color of the hanging fruit among them. Over the hilltop, the solitary group of pines, the running wave of mountain, was a great piece of palest blue, streaked with milky filaments. The boughs of the pine-tree were just below the window, drenched with dew through all their fragrant darkness. Eppie, too, rose, and stood beside him. The hardened misery on his young face hurt her childish, yet comprehending heart even more than Robbie’s supplicating and astonished eyes had done. She could imagine that look of steeled endurance freezing through it forever, and an answering hardness of opposition rose in her to resist and break it. “We won’t forget him.” “People do forget,” Gavan answered. She found a cruel courage. “Could you forget your mother?” Gavan continued to look stonily out of the window and did not answer her. “Could you?” she repeated. “Don’t, Eppie, don’t,” he said. She saw that she had stirred some black terror in him, and her ignorant, responsive fear made her pitiless: “Could you forget her if she died? Never. Never as long as you lived.” “Already,” he said, as though the words were forced from him by her will, “I haven’t remembered her all the time.” “She is there. You haven’t forgotten her.” “Years and years come. New things come. Old things fade and fade,--all but the deepest things. They couldn’t fade. No,” he repeated, “they couldn’t. Only, even they might get dimmer.” She saw that he spoke from an agony of doubt, and he seemed to wrench the knife she had stabbed him with from his heart as he added: “But Robbie is such a little thing. And little things people do forget, I am sure of it. It’s that that makes them so sad.” “Well, then,”--Eppie, too, felt the relief of the lesser pain,--“they will remember again. When you see Robbie in heaven you will remember all about him. But I won’t forget him,” she repeated once more, swallowing the sob that rose chokingly at the thought of how long it would be till they should see Robbie in heaven.