He left Sibylla in a turmoil of feeling. That she loved him was nothing new; she had always loved him, and she had never loved any other man in that fashion. The fairy ride had never been rivalled or repeated; and she had never lost her love for him, even when she hated him as her great enemy. It had always been there, whether its presence had been prized or loathed, welcomed or feared, whether it had seemed the one thing life held, or the one thing to escape from if life were to be worthy. Blake had not displaced it; he had been a refuge from it. Grantley's offence had never been that he did not love her, nor that he could not hold her love; it was that he loved her unworthily and claimed to hold her as a slave. Her case was not as Christine Fanshaw's, any more than her temper was the temper of her friend. And now he came wooing again, and she was sore beset. So memory helped him, so the unforgettable communion of bygone love enforced his suit. Her heart was all for yielding--how should it not be to the one man whose sway it had ever owned? He was to her mind an incomparable wooer--incomparable in his buoyant courage, in the humour that masked his passion, in the passion which used humour with such a conscious art, feigning to conceal without concealing, pretending to reveal without impairing the secrecy of those impenetrable sweet recesses of the heart, concerning which conjecture beats knowledge and the imagination would not be trammelled by a disclosure too unreserved. But she feared and, fearing, struggled. They were friends. Friends could make terms, bargains, treaties, arrangements. Friendship did not bar independence, absolute and uninfringed. Was that the way with love--with the love of woman for man, of wife for husband? No, old Nature came in there with her unchanging decisive word, against which no bargain and no terms, no theory and no views, no claims or pretensions, no folly and no wisdom either, could prevail. All said and done, all concessions made, all promises pledged, all demands guaranteed, they all went for little. The woman was left to depend on the trust she had, helpless if the trust failed her and the confidence were misplaced. If she were wrong about herself or about the man, there was no help for it. The love of the woman was, after all and in spite of all, surrender. Times might change, and thoughts and theories; this might be right which had been wrong, and that held wrong which had been accounted right. The accidents varied, the essence remained. The love of the woman was surrender, because old Nature would have it so. If she gave such love--or acknowledged it, for in truth it was given--she abandoned all the claims, the grievances, the wrongs, all that had been the basis of what she had done. She took Grantley on faith again, she put herself into his hands, again she made the great venture with all its possibilities. She had seemed wrong once. Would she seem wrong again?