"Not so bad as growing up in such a home as ours!" she flashed out fiercely again. "Oh, that's the way you argued that?" he said with a smile. "I was rather wondering. However there are other consequences still." He came yet a pace nearer to her, so that he was close to the table, and rested one hand on it. "There will be other consequences still," he said. "I don't accept the position you propose for me. I don't accept these consequences which you have been so good as to face and decide upon. I refuse them totally--both for myself and for my son I refuse them utterly. It's fair you should understand that. I refuse them root and branch." Blake leant forward, ready to spring up. The idea of violence came into his head, the idea that Grantley might be armed. Grantley noticed his movement, and at last addressed a word to him. "Don't be afraid. I don't mean that," he said with a short laugh. Sibylla spoke to him, sadly now. "You can't refuse. It's put out of your power. This thing must be. It has become inevitable. There's no use in talking of refusing the consequences. They won't be as bad as you think." "It's not inevitable; it's not out of my power. It's entirely in my power to accept your consequences or not to accept them, to face them or not to face them; and I have decided. I won't be, and I won't be known as, what you're making me; and your son shan't have to confess you his mother before men." Young Blake looked at him with a puzzled impatience; Sibylla with a slow pondering glance. She twisted a ring on her finger as she asked: "What do you mean by that?" "In this world nothing need happen to us that we don't choose to bear, and nothing to those who are in our power that we don't choose to accept for them." "What are you talking about?" asked Blake fretfully. "It sounds all nonsense to me." He leant back with a scornful toss of his head. This sort of thing had lasted long enough, in his opinion. "Tell me what you mean," said Sibylla, leaning forward across the table. Grantley announced the resolve that possessed him, born of those bitter meditations, of those intolerable pictures of the future which had formed themselves in his mind as he battled through the storm to Fairhaven. He uttered it not as a threat, but as a warning; it was, as he had said, fair that she should understand. "If you persist, I shall kill Frank and myself to-night." Blake broke into a loud scornful laugh, sticking his hands in his pockets. Grantley turned towards him, smiling slightly. "Oh, this isn't a melodrama, you know," Blake said, "and we're not to be bluffed like that. Don't be so damned absurd, Imason! On my soul, I've had enough of this business without having to listen to stuff like that!" "Do you think it's bluff and melodrama?" Grantley asked Sibylla. "Do you think I've no real intention of doing it?" She looked up at him intently.