She was seized with fear when she reached home that she would encounter Christopher in the hall before she was prepared to accept him as the most unchanged point of her altered world. Instead she met Constantia Wyatt, who was at Marden with her family for Easter, just coming down, who asked her if she had been having a shower bath.
Now Constantia felt a proprietary right over Patricia by reason of her knowledge of Christopher’s sentiments, and her own prophetic instincts. She had most carefully refrained from interference in their affairs, however, and accepted the post of lookeron with praiseworthy consistency. But she looked on with very wide-opened eyes, and this morning when Patricia answered with almost emphatic offhandedness that she had only been for a solitary walk in the rain, she could not refrain from remarking that she appeared to have gathered something more than raindrops and an appetite on her walk, and only laughed when Patricia, betraying no further curiosity, hurried on.
“Something has happened,” she thought to herself. “Patricia’s eyes did not look like that last night. She is grown up.”
But her rare discretion kept her silent, and when later on she was confronted with the news of Christopher’s victory she guessed one-half of the secret of Patricia’s shining eyes.
Patricia exchanged her dripping garments for dry ones and curled herself up on the sofa in her own room before the fire, with full determination to fathom her growing unwillingness to meet Christopher, and to accommodate herself to the new existence, but the gentle languor of mental emotion and physical effort took the caressing warmth of the fire to their aid and 294 cradled her to sleep instead, till the balance of nature was restored.
It was in this manner that Patricia and Christopher arrived at the same cross roads of their lives, where the devious tracks might merge into one another, or, being thrust asunder again by some hedge of convention, continue by a lonely, painful and circuitous route towards the destined goal.
The matter lay in Patricia’s hands, little as either she or Christopher suspected it, and poor Patricia was hampered by a power of tradition and a lack of complete faith of Christopher’s view of her inherited trouble.
Ever since the broken engagement with Geoffry, she had bent in spirit before her own weakness, withstanding it well, and yet a prey to that humiliation of mind that accepts the imperfect as a penalty, instead of claiming the perfect as a birthright. Having given in to this attitude, she now, as a natural consequence, could but see the view offered from that comparatively lowly altitude, and that shut her in with the belief her duty lay in renouncing marriage, and also, more limiting still in its effect, the idea that Christopher also held this view in his secret heart.
She wasted no time in the consideration as to whether he loved her or not: she was sure of that much crown to her own life; but slowly the false conviction thrust itself upon her that had he thought otherwise the long, empty months that had passed would not have been possible. She was too young a woman to balance correctly the power of strenuous occupation on a man as weighed against the emotion to which a woman will yield her whole being without a struggle. Looking back on the long days that had elapsed since the affair by the little chalk pit on the downs, it seemed to her clear that Christopher had avoided her, and there was sufficient truth in this to 295 make it a dangerous lever when handled in connection with the fear of her mind.
It was, therefore, by a quite natural following-out of the mental process that she ultimately arrived at the conclusion it was her duty to assist Christopher to renounce herself, and for that purpose, that she might less hamper his life, she must leave Marden Court.