He felt, suddenly, sunken there in his deep chair, passive and peaceful in the firelight, that it would be very easy to tell her. Why shouldn’t she see it all and understand it all? He couldn’t hurt her; it would be only a strange, a sorrowful picture to her; and to him, yes, there would be a relief in the telling. To speak, for the first time in his life--it would be like the strewing of rosemary on a grave, a commemoration that would have its sweetness and its balm. But he hesitated, feeling the helplessness of his race before verbal self-expression. Eppie lent him a hand. “Begin with when you left me.” “What was I then? I hardly remember. A tiresome, self-centered boy.” “No; you weren’t self-centered. You believed in God, then, and you loved your mother. Why have both of them, as personalities, become illusions to you?” She saw facts clearly and terribly. She was really inside the doors at last, and though it would be all the easier to make her understand the facts she saw, Gavan paled a little before the sudden, swift presence. For, yes, God was gone, and yes,--worse, far worse, as he knew she felt it,--his mother, too--except as that ghost, that pang of memory. She saw his pallor and helped him again, to the first and easier avowal. “How did you lose your faith? What happened to you when you left me?” “It’s a commonplace enough story, that.” “Of course it is. But when loss of faith becomes permanent and permanently means a loss of feeling, it’s not so commonplace.” “Oh, I think it is--more commonplace than people know, in temperaments as unvital and as logical as mine.” “You are not unvital.” “My reason isn’t often blurred by my instincts.” “That is because you are strong--terribly strong. It’s not that your vitality is so little as that your thought is so abnormal.” “No, no; it’s merely that I understand my own experience.” But she had put his feet upon the road, and, turning his eyes from her as he looked, he contemplated its vista. It was easy enough, after all, to gather into words that retrospect of the train; it was easy to be brief and lucid with such a comprehending listener,--to be very impersonal, too; simply to hold up before her eyes the picture that he saw. His eyes met hers seldom while he told her all that was essential to her true seeing. It was wonderful, the sense of her secure, strong life that made it possible to tell her all. The stages of his young, restless, tortured thought were swiftly sketched for an intelligence so quick, and the growing intuition of the capriciousness, the suffering of life. He only hesitated when it came to the reunion with his mother, the change that had crept between them; and her illness, her death; choosing his words with a reticence that bit them the more deeply into the listening mind.