She faced him with a little wrinkle of thought between her brows and spoke with an air of wisdom which went very prettily with the childlike beauty of her face. "You are my friend," she said, "a friend I am very grateful for, but you are not more than that to me. I am frank. You see, I am thinking now of reasons which would not trouble me if I loved you. Marriage with me would do you no good, would hurt you in your career." "No," he protested. "But I am thinking that it would," she replied, steadily, "and I do not believe that I should give much thought to it, if I really loved you. I am thinking of something else, too--" and she spoke more boldly, choosing her words with care--"of a plan which before you came I had formed, of a task which before you came I had set myself to do. I am still thinking of it, still feeling that I ought to go on with it. I do not think that I should feel that if I loved. I think nothing else would count at all except that I loved. So you are still my friend, and I cannot go with you." Chayne looked at her for a moment sadly, with a mist before his eyes. "I leave you to much unhappiness," he said, "and I hate the thought of it." "Not quite so much now as before you came," she answered. "I am proud, you know, that you asked me," and putting her troubles aside, she smiled at him bravely, as though it was he who needed comforting. "Good-by! Let me hear of you through your success." So again they said good-by at the time of sunset. Chayne mounted into the landau and drove back along the road to Weymouth. "So that's the end," said Sylvia. She opened the door and passed again into the garden. Through the window of the library she saw her father and Walter Hine, watching, it seemed, for her appearance. It was borne in upon her suddenly that she could not meet them or speak with them, and she ran very quickly round the house to the front door, and escaped unaccosted to her room. In the library Hine turned to Garratt Skinner with one of his rare flashes of shrewdness. "She didn't want to meet us," he said, jealously. "Do you think she cares for him?" "I think," replied Garratt Skinner with a smile, "that Captain Chayne will not trouble us with his company again." CHAPTER XIV AN OLD PASSION BETRAYS A NEW SECRET