"I wasn't going to say Sally, but I don't want to keep her out. You and Sally, if you like. All I know is, if their reappearance were to bring with it a pleasure I cannot imagine--because I cannot imagine _them_--it would cut across my life, as it is now, in a way that would drive me _mad_. Indeed it would. How could I say to myself--as I say now, as I dare to say to you, knowing what I am--that to be here with you now is the greatest happiness of which I am capable." "All that would change if you recovered them." "Yes--yes--maybe! But I shrink from it; I shrink from _them_! They are strangers--nonentities. You are--you are--oh, it's no use----" He stopped suddenly. "What am I?" "It's no use beating about the bush. You are the centre of my life as it is, you are what I--all that is left of me--love best in the world! I cannot _now_ conceive the possibility of anything but hatred for what might come between us, for what might sever the existing link, whatever it may be--I care little what it is called, so long as I may keep it unbroken...." "And I care nothing!" It was her eyes meeting his that stopped him. He could read the meaning of her words in them before they were spoken. Then he replied in a voice less firm than before: "Dare we--knowing what I am, knowing what may come suddenly, any hour of the day, out of the unknown--_dare_ we call it love?" Perhaps in Fenwick's mind at this moment the predominant feeling was terror of the consequences to her that marriage with him might betray her into. It was much stronger than any misgiving (although a little remained) of her feelings toward himself. "What else can we call it? It is a good old word." She said this quite calmly, with a very happy face one could see the flush of pleasure and success on even in the moonlight, and there was no reluctance, no shrinking in her, from her share of the outcome the Major had not waited to see. "Millais' Huguenot" was complete. Rosalind Graythorpe, or Palliser, stood there again with her husband's arm round her--her husband of twenty years ago! And in that fact was the keynote of what there was of unusual--of unconventional, one might almost phrase it--in her way of receiving and requiting his declaration. It hardly need be said that _he_ was unconscious of any such thing. A man whose soul is reeling with the intoxication of a new-found happiness is not overcritical about the exact movement of the hand that has put the cup to his lips.