“My father will never be any better, you know,” he said. “As for me, I’m all right. I should have come over to see you before this, and looked you up, too, Eppie, but I can’t get away for more than an hour or so at a time.” He led them into the library while he spoke,--Mrs. Arley exclaiming that such devotion was dear and good of him,--and Eppie looked gravely round at the room that he had described to her as the room that he really passed his life in. The great spaces of ranged books framed for her, he knew, pictures of his own existence. He knew, too, that her gravity was the involuntary result of the impression that he made upon her. She was sorry for him. Poor Eppie, their relationship since childhood seemed to have consisted in that--in the sense of her pursuing pity and in his retreat before it, for her sake. He retreated now, as he knew, in his determination to show her that pity was misplaced, uncalled for. Mrs. Arley had thrown off her wrap and loosened her hood in a manner that made it almost imperative to ask them to stay with him for lunch--an invitation accepted with an assurance showing that it had been expected, and it wasn’t difficult, in conventional battledore and shuttlecock with her, to show a good humor and frivolity that discountenanced pathetic interpretations. What Mrs. Arley’s interpretations were he didn’t quite know; her eyes, fatigued yet fresh, were very acute behind their trivial meanings, and he could wonder if Eppie had shared with her her own sense of his “horribleness,” and if, in consequence, her conception of Eppie’s significance as the opponent of that quality was tinged with sentimental associations. Eppie’s gaze, while they rattled on, lost something of its gravity, but he was startled, as if by an assurance deeper than any of Mrs. Arley’s, when she rose to slip off her coat and went across the room to a small old mirror that hung near the door to take off her cap as well. In her manner of standing there with her back to them, untying her veils, pushing back her hair, was the assurance, indeed, of a person whose feet were firmly planted on certain rights, all the more firmly for “knowing her place” as it were, and for having repudiated mistaken assumptions. She might almost have been a new sick-nurse come to take up her duties by his side. She passed from the mirror to the writing-table, examining the books laid there, and then, until lunch was announced, stood looking out of the window. Quite the silent, capable, significant new nurse, with many theories of her own that might much affect the future. The dining-room at Cheylesford Lodge opened on a wonderful old lawn, centuries in its green. Bordered by beds, just alight with pale spring flowers, it swept in and out among shrubberies of rhododendron and laurel, the emerald nook set in a circle of trees, a high arabesque on the sky.