“Asleep, I believe, Christopher, you lazy person. What were you dreaming about?”
“Bees, heather and honey,” he murmured, surreptitiously gathering up a handful of the golden rain she had tossed him. “Have you had your breath of freedom, Patricia—are you ready for tea and buttered toast?”
“And honey, you provoking materialist,” she insisted.
“Honey is stolen property—I always feel a consort of thieves when I eat it.”
“Then I’ll eat it and you can shut your eyes. Christopher, suppose the car goes wrong on the way home?”
He scoffed at that, but while she ate her honey he made an exhaustive inspection of it. 223
When the sun dropped out of sight a shivering wind sprang up and the blue sky drew a grey cloak over itself. Christopher wrapped his companion in a fur coat and tucked her in anxiously.
She had become restless and dissatisfied as if the sun had taken her joy to rest with him, or as if the thoughts gathered from space found an unready lodgment in her mind. Christopher made some effort to talk on indifferent subjects, but she answered with strange brevity or not at all, once with such impatience that he glanced quickly at her hands and saw they were hidden by the long sleeves of his big coat she wore.
Presently she said abruptly:
“We ought not to have stayed so long. Why did you go to sleep?”