His unruffled stepping-back from the arena of political activity was to the more congenial activity of understanding and observation. But there burned in him none of the observer’s, the thinker’s passion. He worked as he rode or ate his breakfast. Work was part of the necessary fuel that kept life’s flame bright. While he lived he didn’t want a feeble, flickering flame. But at his heart, he was profoundly indifferent to work, as to all else. * * * * * GAVAN’S mind, as he leaned back in the railway carriage, had passed over the visual aspect of this long retrospect, not in meditation, but in a passive seeing of its scenes and faces. Eppie’s face, fading in the mist; Robbie, silhouetted on the sky; the sulky Grainger; his uncle; his mother, and the vision of the spring day where he had wandered in the old dream of pain and into its cessation; finally, Alice, her pale hair and wistful eyes and her look when, at parting, she had said that they might be together in heaven. He had rarely known a greater lucidity than in those swift, lonely hours of night. It was like a queer, long pause between a past accomplished and a future not yet begun--as though one should sunder time and stand between its cloven waves. The figures crossed the stage, and he seemed to see them all in the infinite leisure of an eternal moment. This future, its figures just about to emerge from the wings into full view, slightly troubled his reverie. It was at dawn that his mind again turned to it with a conjecture half amused and half reluctant. There was something disturbing in the linkage he must make between that child’s face on the mist and the Miss Gifford he was so soon to see. That she would, at all events in her own conception, dominate the stage, he felt sure; she might even expect a special attention from a spectator whose memory could join hers in that far first act. He was pretty sure that his memory would have to do service for both; and quite sure that memory would not hold for her, as it did for him, a distinct tincture of pain, of restlessness, as though there strove in it something shackled and unfulfilled. One’s thoughts, at four o’clock in the morning, after hours of sleeplessness, became fantastic, and Gavan found himself watching, with some shrinking, this image of the past, suddenly released, brought gasping and half stupefied to the air, to freedom, to new, strong activity, after having been, for so long, bound and gagged and thrust into an underground prison. He turned to a forecast of what Eppie would probably be like. He had heard a good deal about her, and he had not cared for what he had heard. The fact that one did hear a good deal was not pleasing. Every one, in describing her, used the word charming; he had gathered that it meant, as applied to her, more than mere prettiness, wit, or social deftness; and it was precisely for the more that it meant that he did not care.