“Yes, but I don’t know,” she answered, and now she looked at him.  “I suppose that, if I loved, I should know, I should understand.”

Her hands lay in his, listless and unresponsive to the pressure of his.  She spoke slowly and thoughtfully, meeting his gaze with troubled eyes.

“Yet you were glad to see me when I came,” he urged.

“Glad, yes!  You are my friend, my one friend.  I was very glad.  But the gladness passed.  When you asked me to come with you across the garden, I was wanting you to go away.”

The words hurt him.  They could not but hurt him.  But she was so plainly unconscious of offence, she was so plainly trying to straighten out her own tangled position, that he could feel no anger.

“Why?” he asked; and again she frankly answered him.

“I was humbled,” she replied, “and I have had so much humiliation in my life.”

The very quietude of her voice and the wistful look upon the young tired face hurt him far more than her words had done.

“Sylvia,” he cried, and he drew her toward him.  “Come with me now!  My dear, there will be an end of all humiliation.  We can be married, we can go down to my home on the Sussex Downs.  That old house needs a mistress, Sylvia.  It is very lonely.”  He drew a breath and smiled suddenly.  “And I would like so much to show you it, to show you all the corners, the bridle-paths across the downs, the woods, and the wide view from Arundel to Chichester spires.  Sylvia, come!”

Just for a moment it seemed that she leaned toward him.  He put his arm about her and held her for a moment closer.  But her head was lowered, not lifted up to his; and then she freed herself gently from his clasp.

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.”