ntia Wyatt, who was at Marden with her family for Easter, just
coming down, who asked her if she had been having a shower bath.

Now Constantia felt a proprietary right over Patricia by reason of her
knowledge of Christopher's sentiments, and her own prophetic
instincts. She had most carefully refrained from interference in their
affairs, however, and accepted the post of lookeron with praiseworthy
consistency. But she looked on with very wide-opened eyes, and this
morning when Patricia answered with almost emphatic offhandedness that
she had only been for a solitary walk in the rain, she could not
refrain from remarking that she appeared to have gathered something
more than raindrops and an appetite on her walk, and only laughed when
Patricia, betraying no further curiosity, hurried on.

"Something has happened," she thought to herself. "Patricia's eyes did
not look like that last night. She is grown up."

But her rare discretion kept her silent, and when later on she was
confronted with the news of Christopher's victory she guessed one-half
of the secret of Patricia's shining eyes.

Patricia exchanged her dripping garments for dry ones and curled
herself up on the sofa in her own room before the fire, with full
determination to fathom her growing unwillingness to meet Christopher,
and to accommodate herself to the new existence, but the gentle
languor of mental emotion and physical effort took the caressing
warmth of the fire to their aid and cradled her to sleep instead,
till the balance of nature was restored.

It was in this manner that Patricia and Christopher arrived at the
same cross roads of their lives, where the devious tracks might merge
into one another, or, being thrust asunder again by some hedge of
convention, continue by a lonely, painful and circuitous route towards
the destined goal.

The matter lay in Patricia's hands, little as either she or
Christopher suspected it, and poor Patricia was hampered by a power of
tradition and a lack of complete faith of Christopher's view of her
inherited trouble.

Ever since the broken engagement with Geoffry, she had bent in spirit
before her own weakness, withstanding it well, and yet a prey to that
humiliation of mind that accepts the imperfect as a penalty, instead
of claiming the perfect as a birthright. Having given in to this
attitude, she now, as a natural consequence, could but see the view
offered from that comparatively lowly altitude, and that sh