“But you mustn’t be. It was such an obvious muddle for a twisted mind. He knew,” said Eppie, still smiling with the healing radiance, “that I had been jilted, and he knew that I was very fond of you, and he put together the one and one make two that happened to be before him.” She saw that his distress had been far greater than her own, that she now gave him relief. Afterward, as she and Mrs. Arley sped away, her own reaction from the healing attitude showed in a rather grim silence. She leaned back in the swift, keen air, her arms folded in the fullness of her capes. But Mrs. Arley could not repress her own accumulations of feeling. “My dear Eppie,” she said, her hand on her shoulder, and with an almost more than maternal lack of reticence, “I want you to marry him. Don’t glare Medusa at me. I hate tact and silences. Heaven knows I would have scouted the idea of such a match for you before seeing him to-day. But my hard old heart is touched. He is such a dear; so lonely. It’s a nice little place, too, and there is some money. Jim Grainger is too drab-colored a person for you,--all his force, all his sheckles, can’t gild him,--and Kenneth Langley is penniless. This dear creature is not a bit drab and not quite penniless. And you are big enough to marry a man who needs you rather than one you need. _Will_ you think of it, Eppie?” “Grace, you are worse than Captain Palairet,” said Eppie, whose eyes were firmly fixed on the neat leather back of the chauffeur in front of them. “Don’t be cross, Eppie. Why should you mind my prattle?” “Because I care for him so much.” “Well, that’s what I say.” “No; not as I mean it.” “_He_ of course cares, as I mean it.” Eppie did not pause over this. “It’s something different, quite different, from anything else in the world. It can’t be talked about like that. Please, Grace, never, never be like Captain Palairet again. _You_ haven’t softening of the brain. I shall lose Gavan if my friends and his father have such delusions too openly.” XI Gavan went down the noisy, dirty thoroughfare, looking for the turning which would lead him, so the last policeman consulted said, to Eppie’s little square. It was a May day, suddenly clear after rain, liquid mud below, and above a sharply blue sky, looking its relentless contrast at the reeking, sordid streets, the ugly, hurrying life of the wide thoroughfare. All along the gutter was a vociferous fringe of dripping fruit-and food-barrows, these more haphazard conveniences faced by a line of gaudy, glaring shops. The blue above was laced with a tangle of tram-wires and cut with the jagged line of chimney-pots. The roaring trams, the glaring shops, seemed part of a cruel machinery creative of life, and the grim air of permanence, the width and solidity of the great thoroughfare, were more oppressive to Gavan’s nerves, its ugliness fiercer, more menacing, than the narrower meanness of the streets where life seemed to huddle with more despondency.