shivering.

For a moment they still held each other round the neck and shoulder,
then the hold slipped to the elbow, and soon their hands parted. As yet
no word had been said since Michael asserted that nothing else mattered,
and in the silence of their gradual estrangement the sanguine falsity of
that grew and grew and grew.

"I know what you feel," she said at length, "and I feel it also."

Her voice broke, and her hands felt for his again.

"Michael, where are you?" she cried. "No, don't touch me; I didn't mean
that. Let's face it. For all we know, Hermann might have killed Francis.
. . . Whether he did or not, doesn't matter. It might have been. It's
like that."

A minute before Michael, in soul and blood and mind and bones, had said
that nothing but Sylvia and himself had any real existence. He had clung
to her, even as she to him, hoping that this individual love would
prove itself capable of overriding all else that existed. But it had not
needed that she should speak to show him how pathetically he had erred.
Before she had made a concrete instance he knew how hopeless his wish
had been: the silence, the loosening of hands had told him that. And
when she spoke there was a brutality in what she said, and worse than
the brutality there was a plain, unvarnished truth.

There was no question now of her going away at once, as she had
proposed, any more than a boat in the rapids, roared round by breakers,
can propose to start again. They were in the middle of it, and so
short a way ahead was the cataract that ran with blood. On each side
at present were fine, green landing-places; he at the oar, she at the
tiller, could, if they were of one mind, still put ashore, could run
their boat in, declining the passage of the cataract with all its risks,
its river of blood. There was but a stroke of the oar to be made, a pull
on a rope of the rudder, and a step ashore. Here was a way out of the
storm and the rapids.

A moment before, when, by their physical parting they had realised
the strength of the bonds that held them apart this solution had not
occurred to Sylvia. Now, critically and forlornly hopeful, it flashed
on her. She felt, she almost felt--for the ultimate decision rested with
him--that with him she would throw everything else aside, and escape,
just escape, if so he willed it, into some haven of neutrality, where
he and she would be together, leaving the rest of the world, her country
and his, to fight