Christopher assured her not.
“You have hurt your face.”
“The branch of a tree,” he began shamefacedly, and stopped lamely.
“I’m so sorry.”
No more was said. Renata was conscious of her own failure to get on with Christopher, but she put it down entirely to her own shyness, which interfered now in preventing her overriding his very transparent fib in Patricia’s defence. She went away rather troubled and unhappy. But Christopher, a great deal more troubled and unhappy, looked out of the hall window with a gloomy frown. His own words to Patricia that she had so sharply resented, about the women he had seen fighting in the street, had called up other pictures of the older life, pictures in which Marley Sartin figured only too distinctly. He felt uncomfortably near these shifting scenes. Like Patricia, he wanted to deny the connection between himself and the small boy following in the wake of the big man through crowded streets and long vistas of shops. He did not wish to recognise the bond between little Jim Hibbault and Christopher Aston. But the pictures were very insistent and the likeness uncomfortably clear. At last, with no more show of emotion or will than if he were going on an ordinary errand, he walked 84 slowly down the corridor to Cæsar’s room. He had entirely forgotten about Patricia now and was taken aback by Cæsar’s abrupt inquiry about the mark or his face.
“It was an accident,” he said hurriedly, and then plunged straight into his own affairs.
“Cæsar, I have something to give you.”
He held out his hand with a sovereign in it.
Cæsar took it and, after glancing at it casually, put it on the table, looking hard at Christopher, who got red and then white.
“It couldn’t have been the sovereign you lost,” he said earnestly. “I didn’t take any of that money, really, Cæsar. I found this on the floor by the window. It couldn’t have rolled all that long way from here. It must be another.”