“Did you—ever—love her?”
“It is a long time ago, Christina Alberta. There was—seaside love-making. Why do you cross-examine me like this?”
“I want to know. Why”—Christina Alberta had a momentary terror at her own boldness—“Why didn’t you marry her?”
Devizes made no pretence of surprise at the question. “There was no reason manifest why I should have married her. None at all. I can’t conceive what my father would have done if I had come back from Sheringham engaged to a chance acquaintance. And anyhow, why should I have done anything of the sort?”
His eyes defied hers.
“I left her my address,” he added. “She could have written to me. She never did.”
“Did a letter go astray?” said Christina Alberta, and added hastily, “my imagination is running away with me.”
She hesitated and trembled at the next words she had resolved to say, but she said them, with a forced offhandedness. “You see—I might have fancied you as a father?”
It produced no catastrophe. He looked her in the face and then smiled. After that smile she felt that they understood each other completely, and it was very pleasant to think that. “Instead of which, you have to adopt me as a cousin,” he said deliberately. “Cousins it is, Christina Alberta. It’s the best we can do. We have to put our heads together and think of your Daddy. He’s our common concern. I’m interested in that little man. He’s defended himself against many things by those dreams of his. Very wilful dreams they may have been. Who knows? Necessary protective dreams.”
Christina Alberta did not speak for a little time. She nodded. She was glad at their manifest understanding and yet she was disappointed, though she could not have told herself what else she had expected. This man a yard away was the nearest thing in the world to her, and always there might be this invisible barrier between them. They were linked by an invisible tie and they were separated by an unfathomable necessity. Never before in her life had she known what love could be; she wanted to be free to love him; she wanted him to love her.