“Them?” She swung round.
“Cæsar 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.” 188
“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. Cæsar is waiting for me to make roads, not to take short cuts.”