her tender feet.

There should be no more delay than the needed time to race from here
to her. Twenty-five miles of country that his car was eager to devour.
He slipped away swiftly from the past as he had done before on this
very road--to a new future.

CHAPTER XXX

Patricia sat by the fire in her little sitting-room seeking for a
plausible excuse to return to Constantia as soon as might be. The grey
weather, the strange sense of impending events weighed on her, she
knew. She was in the mood when the old evil might flash up again, and
for this reason she kept away from her sister a while, hoping to nurse
herself into a better mind before evening. Christopher had gone again
in his usual abrupt way. Presumably Caesar understood, but she found
herself wishing she also held his confidence. She was hungry for a
repetition of that first evening as a starved child is hungry for a
crust, when the better things seem as far away as heaven. She must go
back to Constantia when she could frame a suitable reason for her
capricious movements. She was much safer there, beside the considerate
friend, who kept the surface of life in a pleasant ripple, and never
seemed to look into the depths or ask her what she found there to
trouble her, as dear little sympathetic Renata did occasionally. Yet
how could she go if Christopher were really coming back to-day, as St.
Michael said, and the future held any possibility of another golden
hour? The force of her deep love turned back on herself, broke through
spirit and heart and let loose in her mind strange imaginings,
alternate glimpses of a heaven or hell that had no relationship with
tradition. She put her hands over her face and kept quite still in the
grip of a sudden agony that made her physically cold and faint and
exhausted. It would pass as it had passed before, yet was she forever
to be at the mercy of this torturing realisation of empty years and
eternal loss? Did Christopher love her or not? The assured "yes" and
the positive "no" were as two shuttlecocks tossed over her strained
mind by the breath of circumstance. Her own erroneous idea that her
still unconquered passion kept them apart was breeding morbid misery
for her, as all false beliefs must do. She had kept herself under
control to-day by dint of isolation, and the inadequacy of that course
filled her with self-contempt. In her solitary fight against the life
forces within and without, she was getting worsted. Sh