te to you."

A faint ghost of a smile touched her white face.

"You are not really telling me what I want to know, Christopher."

"There's nothing else. He hadn't got the real focus of the thing when
I left."

"I understand."

She turned away and leant her arm on the mantelpiece, wondering in a
half-comprehensive way why the stinging sense of humiliation and
helpless shame seemed so much less since Christopher had come. What
had been well-nigh unbearable was now but a monotonous burden that
wearied but did not crush her: she feared it no longer. He stood
looking at her a moment, gathering as it were into himself all he
could of the bitterness that he knew she carried at her heart, and
then turned away to the window, realising the greatness of her trouble
and yearning to do that very thing which unconsciously by mere action
of his receptive sympathy he had done already.

Presently she came to him and put her hand on his arm.

"You'll understand, anyhow, Christopher," she said with a little
sigh.

"We shall all do that here."

"But Geoffry won't."

"I suppose he can't."

She recognised the hard note in his voice at once, and seating herself
on the window-seat set to work to fathom it.

"It will help me if you can tell me exactly how he took it,
Christopher. Was he angry, or sorry, or horrified or what?"

He had to consider a moment what, out of fairness to Geoffry, he must
withhold, and choose what he considered the most pardonable aspect.

"I think he was frightened, Patricia, not at you, so much as at some
silly ideas he's got hold of about heredity. Not his own: just
half-digested ideas, and he probably finds it pretty difficult to
listen to them at all. He just thinks he ought to, I suppose."

Again the faint little smile in her face.

"You are a dear, Christopher, when you try to whitewash things. Listen
to me. Whatever Geoffry said or does or writes, I've decided I will
not marry him. I've written to say so and posted it before you came
in, so he should know that nothing he had said or done influenced me
in the slightest."

Christopher gave a sigh of relief and she went on in the same
deliberate way.

"And I shall never marry at all. I can't face it again. I'll tell
Renata about Geoffry, and may I also tell her you will explain to the
others if she can't satisfy them?"

"I will do anything you wish." Then he suddenly claimed for himself a
little latitude and spoke from his heart.

"Patric