“Oh, a good deal more than that. He is just and conscientious, as the general said. That’s what my mother felt; that’s why she could bear it, my going to him. And the general is right, you know, Eppie, about its being a great thing for me. He is a very important person, in his way, and he is going to put me through. He is determined that my father sha’n’t spoil my life. And, as you know, Eppie, my mother’s life, any chance for her, depends on me. To make her life, to atone to her in any way for all she has had to bear, I must make my own. My uncle will help me.” The steeliness of his resolves made his face almost alien. Eppie felt this unknown future, where he must fight alone, for objects in which she had no share, shutting her out, and a child’s sick misery of desolation filled her, bringing back the distant memory of her mother’s death, that suffocating sense of being left behind and forgotten; but, keeping her eyes on his prospect, she managed in a firm voice to question him about the arid uncle, learned that he was married, childless, had a house in the country and one in London, and sat in Parliament. He was vastly busy, traveled a great deal, and wrote books of travel; not books about foreign people and the things they ate and wore, as Eppie with her courageous interest hopefully surmised, but books of dry, colorless fact, with lots of statistics in them, Gavan said. “He wants me to go in for the same sort of thing--politics and public life.” “You are going to be a Pitt--make laws, Gavan, like Pitt?” Eppie kept up her dispassionate tone. He smiled at the magnified conception. “I’ll try for a seat, probably, or some governmental office; that is, if I turn out to be worth anything.” How the vague vastness shut her out! What should she do, meanwhile? How carve for herself a future that would keep her near him in the great outside world? And would he want her near him in it when he was to be so great, too? This question brought the irrepressible tears to her eyes at last, though she turned away her head and would not let them fall. But Gavan glanced at her and leaned forward to look, and then she saw, as her eyes met his, that the hard resolve was for her, too, and did not shut her out, but in. “I’m coming back, Eppie,” he said, taking her hand and holding it tightly. “Next to my mother, it’s _you_,--you know it.” “I haven’t any mother,” said Eppie, keeping up the bravery, though it was really harder not to cry now. He understood where she placed him.