“You are not really telling me what I want to know, Christopher.”
“There’s nothing else. He hadn’t got the real focus of the thing when I left.”
“I understand.”
She turned away and leant her arm on the mantelpiece, wondering in a half-comprehensive way why the stinging sense of humiliation and helpless shame seemed so much less since Christopher had come. What had been well-nigh unbearable was now but a monotonous burden that wearied but did not crush her: she feared it no longer. He stood looking at her a moment, gathering as it were into himself all he could of the bitterness that he knew she carried at her heart, and then turned away to the window, realising the greatness of her trouble and yearning to do that very 285 thing which unconsciously by mere action of his receptive sympathy he had done already.
Presently she came to him and put her hand on his arm.
“You’ll understand, anyhow, Christopher,” she said with a little sigh.
“We shall all do that here.”
“But Geoffry won’t.”
“I suppose he can’t.”
She recognised the hard note in his voice at once, and seating herself on the window-seat set to work to fathom it.