zement.

"Tell him yourself, Patricia."

"Christopher!"

He looked straight ahead, a certain rigidness in the outline of his
face betokening a decision at variance with his will.

"What am I to tell him?"

"What you like."

"I shall not tell him the silly thing you said just now, you know."

"What thing?"

"About not marrying."

"It doesn't matter," she said indifferently, "he won't marry me if he
thinks I tried to hit him."

Christopher closed his mind and reason to so illogical a conclusion,
but he disputed the point no more, and it was not till he left her and
turned to face instantly the task she had laid upon him, that he
realised how overwhelmingly difficult it was.

CHAPTER XXV

"I suppose no one realised you did not know all about it as you'd
known them all so long."

Christopher concluded his simple and direct account with these words,
and waited vainly for a reply from his hearer, who stood by the window
with his back to him.

"It's so nearly a thing of the past, too, that it hardly seemed worth
mentioning," he went on presently, an uneasy wonder at the silence
growing on him.

At length Geoffry spoke, in a thick, slow way, like a man groping in
darkness.

"You mean she did throw that stone deliberately, meaning to hit me?"

He had no sight at present for the wider issues that beset them or for
Patricia's story: his attention was concentrated on the incident
immediately affecting him and he could see it in no light but that of
dull horror.

"Deliberately tried to do it?" he repeated, turning to Christopher.

"There wasn't anything deliberate about it. She just flung the stone
at you precisely as you flung one at the rabbit. Sort of blind
instinct. She does not know now she really hurt you."

He glanced at the crossing strips of plaster with which the other's
head was adorned on the right side.

"It's horrible," muttered Geoffry, "I can't understand it."

"It's simple enough." There was growing impatience in Christopher's
voice. "She inherits this ghastly temper as I've told you. It's like a
sudden gust of wind if she's not warned. It takes her off her feet,
as it were, but she's nearly learnt to stand firm. She has a wretched
time after."

"It's madness."

"It's nothing of the kind. She wasn't taught to control it as a child.
They just treated it as something she couldn't help."

"By heavens, are you going to make out she can help it, and that that
makes it better?"