Gavan’s hurt soon healed, though it made him languid for a day or two--days of semi-invalidism, the unemphatic hours, seemingly so colorless, when she read to him or merely sat silently at hand occupied with her letters or a book, drawing still closer their odd intimacy; it could hardly be called sudden, for it had merely skipped intervening years, and it couldn’t be called a proved intimacy, the intervening years were too full, too many for that. But they were very near in their almost solitude--a solitude surrounded by gentle reminders of the closer past, reminders, in the case of living personalities, who seemed to find the intimacy altogether natural and needing no comment. What the general and Miss Barbara might really be thinking was a wonder that at moments occupied both Gavan and Eppie’s ruminations; but it wasn’t a wonder that needed to go far or deep. What they thought, the dear old people, made very little difference--not even the difference of awkwardness or self-consciousness under too cogitating eyes. Even if they thought the crude and obvious thing it didn’t matter, they would so peacefully relapse from their false inference once time had set it straight for them. Eppie couldn’t quite have told herself why its obviousness was so crude; in all her former experience such obviousness had never been so almost funnily out of the question. But Gavan made so many things almost funnily out of the question. It was this quality in him, of difference from usual things, that drew intimacy so near. To talk to him with a wonderful openness, to tell him about herself, about her troubles, was like sinking down in a pale, peaceful church and sighing out everything that lay heavily on one’s heart--the things that lay lightly, too, for little things as well as great, were understood by that compassionate, musing presence--to the downlooking face of an imaged saint. No claim upon one remained after it; one was freed of the load of silence and one hadn’t in the least been shackled by retributory penances. And if one felt some strange lack in the saint, if his sacerdotal quality was more than his humanity, it was just because of that that one was able to say anything one liked. At moments, it is true, she had an odd, fetish-worshiper’s impulse to smash her saint, and perhaps the reason why she never yielded to it was because, under all the seeing him as image, was the deep hoping that he was more. If he was more, much more, it might be unwise to smash him, for then she would have no pale church in which to take refuge, and, above all, if he were more he mustn’t find it out--and she mustn’t--through any act of her own. The saint himself must breathe into life and himself step down from his high pedestal. That he cared to listen, that he listened lovingly,--just as he had listened lovingly to Mrs. MacHendrie,--she knew.