“What am I to tell her, then?” he demanded shortly.
The real tenor of the discussion seemed to break suddenly upon Geoffry and he was cruelly alive to his own inability to meet it. He spoke hurriedly and almost pleadingly.
“Don’t go yet. I’ve got to think this out. Can’t you help me?”
“What’s there to think about? I’ve told you. I can tell you how to help her if you like.”
“I’ve got to think of a jolly sight more than you 281 seem to imagine,” returned the sorely beset young man irritably, but unable to keep a touch of conscious superiority out of his voice, “a jolly sight more, if I marry her.”
“If you marry her?” Christopher turned on him with blazing eyes.
“I’m not saying I shan’t—but it’s a pretty bad pass for us both. I know how she feels. Marriage isn’t just a question of pleasing oneself, you see. I must think it out for both of us.”
Christopher began to speak and desisted. The other went on in an aggrieved tone.
“I ought to have been told. Heredity of that sort isn’t a thing to be played with, you know. Anything might happen. Why wasn’t I told?” He walked to and fro, and stopped by Christopher again.
“I wouldn’t mind a bit,” he burst out, “if it were just a bad joke, if she flung at me in fun and didn’t expect to hit.”