They became a little more definite over lover-confessions.  Michael had, so to speak, nothing to confess:  he had loved all along—­he had wanted her all along; there never had been the least pretence or nonsense about it.  Her path was a little more difficult to trace, but once it had been traversed it was clear enough.  She had liked him always; she had felt sister-like from the moment when Hermann brought him to the house, and sister-like she had continued to feel, even when Michael had definitely declared there was “no thoroughfare” there.  She had missed that relationship when it stopped:  she did not mind telling him that now, since it was abandoned by them both; but not for the world would she have confessed before that she had missed it.  She had loved being asked to come and see his mother, and it was during those visits that she had helped to pile the barricade across the “sister-thoroughfare” with her own hands.  She began to share Michael’s sense of the impossibility of that road.  They could not walk down it together, for they had to be either more or less to each other than that.  And, during these visits, she had begun to understand (and her face a little hid itself) what Michael’s love meant.  She saw it manifested towards his mother; she was taught by it; she learned it; and, she supposed, she loved it.  Anyhow, having seen it, she could not want Michael as a brother any longer, and if he still wanted anything else, she supposed (so she supposed) that some time he would mention that fact.  Yes:  she began to hope that he would not be very long about it. . . .

Michael went over this very deliberately as he sat waiting for her twenty-four hours later.  He rehearsed this moment and that over and over again:  in mind he followed himself and Sylvia across to the piano, not hurrying their steps, and going through the verse of the song she sang at the pace at which she actually sang it.  And, as he dreamed and recollected, he heard a little stir in the quiet house, and Sylvia came.

They met just as they met yesterday in front of the fireplace.

“Oh, Michael, have you been waiting long?” she said.

“Yes, hours, or perhaps a couple of minutes.  I don’t know.”

“Ah, but which?  If hours, I shall apologise, and then excuse myself by saying that you must have come earlier than you intended.  If minutes I shall praise myself for being so exceedingly punctual.”

“Minutes, then,” said he.  “I’ll praise you instead.  Praise is more convincing if somebody else does it.”

“Yes, but you aren’t somebody else.  Now be sensible.  Have you done all the things you told me you were going to do?”

“Yes.”

Sylvia released her hands from his.

“Tell me, then,” she said.  “You’ve seen your father?”

There was no cloud on Michael’s face.  There was such sunlight where his soul sat that no shadow could fall across it.

“Oh, yes, I saw him,” he said.