Her voice broke, and her hands felt for his again. “Michael, where are you?” she cried. “No, don’t touch me; I didn’t mean that. Let’s face it. For all we know, Hermann might have killed Francis. . . . Whether he did or not, doesn’t matter. It might have been. It’s like that.” A minute before Michael, in soul and blood and mind and bones, had said that nothing but Sylvia and himself had any real existence. He had clung to her, even as she to him, hoping that this individual love would prove itself capable of overriding all else that existed. But it had not needed that she should speak to show him how pathetically he had erred. Before she had made a concrete instance he knew how hopeless his wish had been: the silence, the loosening of hands had told him that. And when she spoke there was a brutality in what she said, and worse than the brutality there was a plain, unvarnished truth. There was no question now of her going away at once, as she had proposed, any more than a boat in the rapids, roared round by breakers, can propose to start again. They were in the middle of it, and so short a way ahead was the cataract that ran with blood. On each side at present were fine, green landing-places; he at the oar, she at the tiller, could, if they were of one mind, still put ashore, could run their boat in, declining the passage of the cataract with all its risks, its river of blood. There was but a stroke of the oar to be made, a pull on a rope of the rudder, and a step ashore. Here was a way out of the storm and the rapids. A moment before, when, by their physical parting they had realised the strength of the bonds that held them apart this solution had not occurred to Sylvia. Now, critically and forlornly hopeful, it flashed on her. She felt, she almost felt--for the ultimate decision rested with him--that with him she would throw everything else aside, and escape, just escape, if so he willed it, into some haven of neutrality, where he and she would be together, leaving the rest of the world, her country and his, to fight over these irreconcilable quarrels. It did not seem to matter what happened to anybody else, provided only she and Michael were together, out of risk, out of harm. Other lives might be precious, other ideals and patriotisms might be at stake, but she wanted to be with him and nothing else at all. No tie counted compared to that; there was but one life given to man and woman, and now that her individual happiness, the individual joy of her love, was at stake, she felt, even as Michael had said, that nothing else mattered, that they would be right to realise themselves at any cost. She took his hands again. “Listen to me, Michael,” she said. “I can’t bear any longer that these horrors should keep rising up between us, and, while we are here in the middle of it all, it can’t be otherwise. I ask you, then, to come away with me, to leave it all behind. It is not our quarrel. Already Hermann has gone; I can’t lose you too.”