ount for
if I failed them."

"Them?" She swung round.

"Caesar and my mother."

There was a pause.

"And so you will go to Belgium and think?" she said lightly.

"No, I shall go to Belgium and work."

"You said _think_," she insisted.

"I have thought here. I was not sure when I came, but I am now."

"May I know what you have thought?"

For a moment the strangeness of speaking to her like this held him
dumb. How did it happen she should know so much and must know more,
she who had been barely a real individual to him before? It bewildered
and confused him. He did not understand that the unspoken passionate
claim he made on one woman had broken the barriers between him and
woman-kind, that because he loved Patricia Connell he could speak to
Constantia Wyatt, for they stood together on holy ground.

"You have every right. You helped me after all," he said doubtfully,
but smiling "I ought not to have hesitated. Caesar is waiting for me to
make roads, not to take short cuts."

"You think love can better afford to wait than Caesar?"

"I have my life before me."

"And if you lose her?"

"It is settled," he said simply.

She drew in her breath. By every law of man he was right, and yet all
the woman in her cried out against this decision as falseness to some
other law imperfectly understood, but clamorous for recognition.
Nevertheless how her heart went out to him for the quiet finality of
that refusal to yield to a law not of his own making! She was proud he
was so much the handiwork of Aymer, while she recognised the very
weakness of his strength.

"He will lose her," she mused as she sat alone when he had gone, "and
it would break Aymer's heart if he knew, but he won't know. He has
succeeded in making a man of him, but, oh, what a nice boy he would
have been!"

So Christopher turned his back on the great discovery and went to
Belgium. Whereupon Patricia complained bitterly, but her golf
improved, and Geoffry Leverson, who knew nothing of road-making,
started on a very short cut indeed.

The Roadmaker remained in Belgium longer than he expected and in the
laboratory of a great man stumbled on the key of the discovery that in
a few years was to make him famous from one end of Europe to the
other.

When the apple blossoms were again blushing pink across the land and
the blue sky was piled high with dreams of love castles, Christopher
remembered the short cut and abruptly announced his intention of
r