He had just time to catch her hand, to lean to her, to kiss her. He did not speak. Mutely he looked at the little comrade all the things he could not say: what she was to him, what he felt for her, what he would always feel,--always, always, always, his eyes said to hers as she stepped back to the road and was gone. PART II I He had never seen Eppie again, and sixteen years had passed. It was of this that Gavan was thinking as the Scotch express bore him northward on a dark October night. A yellow-bound, half-cut volume of French essays lay beside him. He had lighted a cigar and, his feet warmly ensconced on the hot-water tin, his legs enfolded in rugs, the fur collar of his coat turned up about his ears, he leaned back, well fortified against the sharp air that struck in from the half-opened window. Gavan, at thirty, had oddly maintained all the more obvious characteristics of his boyhood. He was long, pale, emaciated, as he had been at fourteen. His clean-shaved face was the boy’s face, matured, but unchanged in essentials. The broad, steep brow, the clear, aquiline jut of nose and chin, the fineness and strength of the jaw, sculptured now by the light overhead into vehement relief and shadow, were more emphatic, only, than they had been. At fourteen his face had surprised with its maturity and at thirty it surprised with its quality of wistful boyishness. This was the obvious. The changes were there, but they were subtle, consisting more in a certain hardening of youth’s hesitancy into austerity; as though the fine metal of the countenance had been tempered by time into a fixed, enduring type. His pallor was the scholar’s, but his emaciation the athlete’s; the fragility, now, was a braced and disciplined fragility. No sedentary softness was in him. In his body, as in his face, one felt a delicacy as strong as it was fine. The great change was that hardening to fixity. To-night, he was feeling the change himself. The journey to Kirklands, after the long gap that lay between it and his farewell, made something of an epoch for his thoughts. He did not find it significant, but the mere sense of comparison was arresting. The darkness of the October night, speeding by outside, the solitude of the bright railway carriage, London two hours behind and, before, the many hours of his lonely journey,--time and place were like empty goblets, only waiting to be filled with the still wine of memory. Gavan had not cast aside his book, lighted his cigar, and, leaning back, drawn his rugs about him with the conscious intention of yielding himself to retrospect. On the contrary, he had, at first, pushed aside the thoughts that, softly, persistently, pressed round him. Then the languor, the opportunity of the hour seized him. He allowed himself to drift hither and thither, as first one eddy lapped over him and then another. And finally he abandoned himself to the full current and, once it had him, it carried him far.