"Suppose we don't talk about rights at all? I'm not anxious to."
"It'll be hard; but we'll try to be friends for his sake—that he may have a happy home."
Grantley's heart was stirred within him.
"That's good; but is that all?" he asked in a low voice full of feeling. "Is it all over for ourselves? Can't we be friends for our own sakes?"
"Haven't we lost—well, not the right—if you don't like that—but the power?"
"I'm an obstinate man; you know that very well."
"It'll be hard—for both of us; but, yes, we'll try."
She gave him her hand to bind the bargain; he gripped it with an intensity that surprised and alarmed her. She could see his eyes through the gloom. Were they asking friendship only? There was more than that in his heart and in his eyes—a thing never dead in him. It had sprung to fresh vigour now, from the lessons of calamity, from the pity born in him, from the new eyes with which he had looked on the boy in his mother's arms. She could not miss the expression of it.
"Is that the best we can try for?" he whispered. "There was something else once, Sibylla."
He had not moved, yet she raised her hands as though to check or beat off his approach. She was afraid. All that the path he again beckoned her on had meant to her came to her mind. If she followed him along it, would it not be once more to woo disillusion, to court disaster, to invite that awful change to bitterness and hatred?