“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 276 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 ever shielded from the relentless pressure of her life. The temptation was more subtle and harder to withstand than on the sunny, gorse-covered cliff at Milton, for it was her need and her pain that cried for help and love, and she who suffered because he withstood. He could in no wise see what course he was to take beyond the minute, but he knew quite clearly what course he must not take, and such surety was the reward he won from that other fight.