as stricken into a frightened gravity. And
then, with no prelude, no approach, quite simply and directly, he
spoke. "I wonder how much you care for me?" he said musingly, as he
had said everything else that afternoon: and as she positively paled
at the eeriness of this echo from her own thought, he went on, his
voice vibrating in the deep organ note of a great moment, "You must
know, of course, by this time that I care everything possible for
you."

Compressed into an instant of acute feeling Sylvia felt the pangs
which had racked her as a little girl when she had stood in the
schoolyard with Camilla Fingal before her, and the terrifying hostile
eyes about her. Her two selves rose up against each other fiercely,
murderously, as they had then. The little girl sprang forward to help
the woman who for an instant hesitated. The fever and the struggle
vanished as instantly as they had come. Sylvia felt very still, very
hushed. Page had told her that she always rose to crucial moments. She
rose to this one. "I don't know," she said as quietly as he, with as
utter a bravery of bare sincerity, "I don't know how much I care for
you--but I think it is a great deal." She rose upon a solemn wing of
courage to a greater height of honesty. Her eyes were on his, as clear
as his. The mere beauty of her face had gone like a lifted veil. For a
instant he saw her as Sylvia herself did not dream she could be. "It
is very hard," said Sylvia Marshall, with clear eyes and trembling
lips of honest humility, "for a girl with no money to know how much
she cares for a very rich man."

She had never been able to imagine what she would say if the moment
should come. She had certainly not intended to say this. But an
unsuspected vein of granite in her rang an instant echo to his
truth. She was bewildered to see his ardent gaze upon her deepen to
reverence. He took her hand in his and kissed it. He tried to speak,
but his voice broke.

She was immensely moved to see him so moved. She was also entirely at
a loss. How strangely different things always were from forecasts of
them! They had suddenly taken the long-expected stride away from their
former relation, but she did not know where they had arrived. What was
the new status between them? What did Austin think she meant? It came
to her with a shock that the new status between them was, on the
surface, exactly what it was in reality; that the avowed relation
between them was, as far as it went, p