ong hours
of work and the tense look on his face gave way.

"I shall know in about a fortnight if it's coming out all right," he
said to Caesar abruptly one day, "and it's a fortnight in which I can
do nothing but wait."

"Go and play," said Caesar, watching him anxiously, "you concentrate
too much. You'll be getting nervous."

Christopher laughed and gripped Caesar's hand in his firm, steady
grasp.

"Never better in my life," he said. "Concentration is an excellent
thing. I'm beginning to appreciate Nevil."

He spent the next five days in true Nevil fashion, however, following
the whim of the moment, and "lazing" as thoroughly as he had worked.
Geoffry and Patricia claimed his attendance, or Patricia did and
Geoffry made no protest. They were supremely happy days. The three
talked of nothing in particular, just the easy surface aspect of the
world and the moment's sunshine, and Geoffry was secretly surprised to
find his pleasure so little diminished by the third presence.

Then one day that wore no different outer aspect to its fellows in
their livery of autumn sunshine, the three walked over the wooded
ridge to the open downland where the brown windswept turf was
interspaced with stretches of stubble and blue-green "roots," where a
haze of shimmering light hung over copse and field, and beyond the
undulating near country a line of hills purple and grey melted into
the sky-line.

They had discussed hotly a disputed point as they mounted from the
valley and came out on this good land of promise in a sudden silence.
Patricia seated herself on the soft turf at the edge of a little chalk
pit and sat in her accustomed attitude with her hands folded, looking
straight before her, and the two men sat on either side of her. And
over all three a sense of the smallness of the matter over which they
had differed drifted in varied manners.

Geoffry realised how little he really cared about it. Christopher was
amused at their futile efforts to solve a problem of which they knew
nothing, but Patricia was angry, first that she had been betrayed into
expressing concern in something of which she was really ignorant, and
secondly that neither Christopher nor Geoffry had agreed with her. The
matter of the discussion--it arose from the subject of village
charities--became of no importance, but the sense of irritation
remained with her, and she was unaccountably cross with Christopher.
Geoffry's point of view she could ignore, bu