"Afraid!" he said. "You!"
She tried to laugh. "You think me a very bold person, don't you?
Or you wouldn't have suggested such a thing."
"I think you've got plenty of grit," he said, "but that wasn't what made me suggest it." He paused a moment. "Perhaps it's hardly worth while going on," he said then. "I seem to have gone too far already. Please believe I meant well, that's all!"
"Oh, I know that!" she said.
And then, moved by a curious impulse, she did an extraordinary thing. She leaned forward and laid her clasped hands on his knee.
"I'm going to be—awfully frank with you," she said rather tremulously. You—won't mind?''
He sat motionless for a second. Then very quietly he dropped his pipe back into his pocket and grasped her slender wrists. "Go on!" he said.
Her face was lifted, very earnest and appealing, to his. "You know," she said, "we are not strangers. We haven't been from the very beginning. We started comrades, didn't we?"
"We should have been married by this time, if I hadn't put the brake on," said Burke.
"Yes," Sylvia said. "I know. That is what makes me feel so—intimate with you. But it is different for you. I am a total stranger to you. You have never met me—or anyone like me—before. Have you?"