out?"

"Bees, heather and honey," he murmured, surreptitiously gathering up a
handful of the golden rain she had tossed him. "Have you had your
breath of freedom, Patricia--are you ready for tea and buttered
toast?"

"And honey, you provoking materialist," she insisted.

"Honey is stolen property--I always feel a consort of thieves when I
eat it."

"Then I'll eat it and you can shut your eyes. Christopher, suppose the
car goes wrong on the way home?"

He scoffed at that, but while she ate her honey he made an exhaustive
inspection of it.

When the sun dropped out of sight a shivering wind sprang up and the
blue sky drew a grey cloak over itself. Christopher wrapped his
companion in a fur coat and tucked her in anxiously.

She had become restless and dissatisfied as if the sun had taken her
joy to rest with him, or as if the thoughts gathered from space found
an unready lodgment in her mind. Christopher made some effort to talk
on indifferent subjects, but she answered with strange brevity or not
at all, once with such impatience that he glanced quickly at her hands
and saw they were hidden by the long sleeves of his big coat she
wore.

Presently she said abruptly:

"We ought not to have stayed so long. Why did you go to sleep?"

"I didn't," he retorted, amazed at the accusation.

"Then you ought to have talked."

"I thought we were superior to such conventions."

"That is an excuse for sheer laziness on your part. And even if you
are superior," she added, inconsequently, "I am not. What were you
thinking about?"

"Shall I tell you of what you were thinking?"

"You can't."

"Out in the great space you saw all the future days weaving for you a
dress of blue and gold, of hopes and fulfilment. You saw how they
smiled at you, you were glad of the love they bore you, the good they
were bringing you. You felt in your own soul how you belonged to them,
you were a part of all this dear living world."

"Don't, don't," she cried, half under her breath.

"Isn't it true?" he insisted.

"You have no business, no right to know. Christopher, how dare you."
Her face flushed with inward emotion, with some fierce resentment that
laid hold of her senses without reason and dragged fear in its wake.

"I'm sorry," he said humbly. "I've often done it before and you never
minded."

"It's quite different now. It's unbearable. I don't like it any more,
I hate it. Do you hear, Christopher?"

"Yes. It was unpardonable