One day when he was again able to be out and when they were again upon the hilltop, walking in a mist that enshrouded them, she told him all about the wretched drama of her love-affair. She had never spoken of it to a human being. It was as if she led him into an empty room, dusty and dark and still, with dreary cobwebs stretching over its once festal furniture, and there pointed out to him faded blood-stains on the floor. No eyes but his had ever seen them. She told him all, analyzing the man, herself, unflinchingly, putting before him her distracted heart, distorted in its distraction. She had appalled herself. Her part had not been mere piteous nobility. She would have dragged herself through any humiliation to have had him back, the man she had helplessly adored. She would have taken him back on almost any terms. Only the semblance of pride had been left to her; beneath it, with all her scorn of him, was a craving that had been base in its despair. “But that wasn’t the worst,” said Eppie; “that very baseness had its pathos. Worst of all were my mean regrets. I had sacrificed my ambitions for him; I had refused a man who would have given me the life I wanted, a high place in the world, a great name, power, wide issues,--and I love high places, Gavan, I love power. When I refused him, he too married some one else, and it was after that that my crash came. Love and faith were thrown back at me, and I hadn’t in it all even my dignity. I was torn by mingled despairs. I loathed myself. Oh, it was too horrible!” His utter lack of sympathetic emotion, even when she spoke with the indignant tears on her cheeks, made it all the easier to say these fundamental things, and more than ever like the saint of ebony and ivory in the pale church was his head against the great wash of mist about them. “And now it has all dropped from you,” he said. “Yes, all--the love, the regret certainly, even the shame. The ambition, certainly not; but in that ugly form of a loveless marriage it’s no longer a possible temptation for me. My disappointment hasn’t driven me to worldly materialism. It’s a sane thing in nature, that outgrowing of griefs, though it’s bad for one’s pride to see them fade and one’s heart mend, solidly mend, once more.” “They do go, when one really sees them.” “Some do.” “All, when one really sees them,” he repeated unemphatically. “I know all about it, Eppie. I’ve been through the fire, too. Now that it’s gone, you see that it’s only a dream, that love, don’t you?” Eppie gazed before her into the mist, narrowing her eyes as though she concentrated her thoughts upon his exact meaning, and she received his casual confidence with some moments of silence. “That would imply that seeing destroyed feeling, wouldn’t it?” she said at last. “I see that _such_ love is a dream, if you will; but dreams may be mirrors of life, not delusions; hints of an awakened reality.”