She gave him her hand to bind the bargain; he gripped it with an intensity that surprised and alarmed her. She could see his eyes through the gloom. Were they asking friendship only? There was more than that in his heart and in his eyes--a thing never dead in him. It had sprung to fresh vigour now, from the lessons of calamity, from the pity born in him, from the new eyes with which he had looked on the boy in his mother's arms. She could not miss the expression of it. "Is that the best we can try for?" he whispered. "There was something else once, Sibylla." He had not moved, yet she raised her hands as though to check or beat off his approach. She was afraid. All that the path he again beckoned her on had meant to her came to her mind. If she followed him along it, would it not be once more to woo disillusion, to court disaster, to invite that awful change to bitterness and hatred? "You are you, and I am I," she protested. "It--it is impossible, Grantley." His face assumed its old obstinate squareness as he heard her. "I don't want that," she murmured. "I'll try to be friends. We can understand one another as friends, make allowances, give and forgive. Friendship's charitable. Let's be friends, Grantley." "You have no love left for me?" he asked, passing by her protests. "For months past I've hated you." "I know that. And you have no love left for me?" She looked at him again, with fear and shrinking in her eyes. "Have you forgotten what I did? No, you can't have forgotten! How can you wish me to love you now? It would be horrible for both of us. You may forgive me, as I do you--what I may have to forgive; but how can we be lovers again? How can we--with that in the past?" "The past is the past," he said calmly. She walked away from him a little. When she came back in a minute or so, he saw that she was in strong agitation. "That's enough to-night--enough for all time, if you so wish," he said gently. "Only I had to tell you what was in my heart." "How could you, Grantley?" "I haven't said it was easy. I'm coming to believe that the easy things aren't worth much." "You could love me again?" "I've never ceased to love you--only I hope I know a bit more about how to do it now." She stood there the picture of distress and of fear. At last she broke out: "Ah, I've not told you the real thing! I'm afraid Grantley, I'm afraid! I dare not love you. Because I loved you so beyond all reason and all--all sanity, all this came upon us. And--and I daren't love you again now, even if I could. Yes, I ought to have learnt something too; perhaps I have. But I daren't trust myself with my knowledge." She came a step nearer to him, holding out her hands beseechingly. "Friends, friends, Grantley!" she implored. "Then we shall be safe. And our love shall be for Frank. You'll get to love Frank, won't you?"