der a
professional, which proposal he treated with scorn, but after a short
silence he said in a different voice:

"Don't think I'm not glad at anything that makes you happy, Patricia.
Geoffry's a real good sort and--here's a town--you must not speak to
the man at the wheel."

Patricia was obedient. She sank into a reverie in which, despite her
own determination, Geoffry played a long part. It was characteristic
of her exact attitude towards her accepted lover that it was the
immediate future in which he figured most clearly. Her thoughts
hovered round the pleasant summer to come with the distant excitement
of a wedding to crown it. She never considered, or only in the most
cursory way, the long years ahead, the daily companionship with the
man she had chosen. She was honestly attached to Geoffry. She believed
she was in love with him, whereas, as is far more often the case than
the young suppose, she was in love with the love that had come to her
in the glory of the spring, offered by familiar hands that were dear
because of what they held for her.

So they drove through the glowing afternoon, and the line of white
road before them appeared to Christopher as a track dividing past and
future, the thin edge of the passing minutes. They spoke no more,
however, on the forbidden subject. Christopher presently explained to
her the visible mechanism of the car and on a stretch of clear road
let her put her hands on the wheel beneath his own and feel the joy of
fictitious control. Before the sun quenched itself in the sea they
stood on the Cliff Edge and looked out across the shining waters into
the great space, where a thought-laden air renews itself, reforming,
cancelling and creating in the crucible of Life. They clambered down
from the lip of the cliff on to a jutting-out shelf of rock, screened
with gorse, where the few feet of gravel bank behind them shut out
all signs of habitation.

Patricia sat with her hands clasped round her knees drawing slow, deep
draughts of the cool air, her eyes on the immense free space, and she
spoke not at all with her lips, yet Christopher, lying at her feet,
caught her thoughts as they came and went with strange certainty and
stranger heartache. He picked a handful of golden gorse petals and
pressed the sweet blossoms to his face: ever after their scent was to
mean for him that place and rapture of that hour, in which was borne
to him the certainty of his right to her, and the knowled