kimmed again over the close green turf to
their feet as it touched the edge of the chalk pit. She shivered a
little.

"Take me home, Christopher."

He helped her up and with steady hands assisted her to smooth her hair
and put on her hat, and then they turned and walked back along the
path they had come. Christopher was greatly troubled. It seemed to
him incredible that Geoffry had been left in ignorance of this cruel
inheritance. He tried to gauge the effect of it on his apparently
unsuspecting mind and was uneasy and dissatisfied over the result.

"Someone must explain to Geoffry," he said presently; "will you like
him to come over to-night and tell him yourself, Patricia?"

"I don't want to see him." There was a deep note of fatigue in her
voice, also a new accent of indifference. Her mind was in no way
occupied with her lover's attitude towards the unhappy episode.

"Someone's got to see him and explain. It's only fair," persisted
Christopher resolutely.

"What is there to explain. What does it matter?"

"He thinks it was an accident."

She walked on a little quicker.

"Patricia, you must tell him."

Then she turned and faced him, and her pallor was burnt out with red.

"Christopher, I will not see him. I can't. What's the use? What can he
do?"

"He must learn how to help you, learn how to stop it," he said
doggedly.

She gave a curious, choking laugh. "Geoffry stop it? Don't be absurd,
Christopher. You know he'd make me ten times worse if he tried.
Anyhow, I'm not going to marry him."

"Patricia!"

"Don't, don't. I can't bear anything now. But I won't marry him, or
anyone. It's not safe."

She went on down the path swiftly, without looking back, hardly
conscious of the tears falling from her brimming eyes. Christopher
followed her silently, furious with himself because of some
unreasoning exultation in his heart, some clamorous sense of kinship
with the golden land and laden earth that had been absent as they
came, but it died when, presently emerging from the wood on to the
park land facing Marden, she turned to him again regardless of her
tears.

"He won't want to marry me now, anyhow," she said wistfully, with a
child's appealing look of distress.

A great pity welled up in his heart and drowned the last thought of
self, carrying visions of the cruel isolation this grim inheritage
might entail on her, and he had hard work to refrain from taking her
in his arms then and there to hold for