Marie smiled faintly. Poor old Chris! What an awful position for him. She shut her eyes tightly with a quick feeling of giddiness.
What could she do now? What could she say to him? Ought she to tell him?
She tried to think, but somehow her brain felt woolly and would not work. There was a queer little pain in her hand, and looking down blankly, she saw that her nails had cut deeply into her flesh, 19 their clasp of one another had been so cruel.
"The money was left between them on condition they married— otherwise she got it all."
The words beat against her brain as if daring her to forget them.
Poor Chris! He had always been fond of money. He had never had enough to spend! She could remember when he first went to Oxford, how often he wrote home for extra money.
It had never been refused, either. She knew that her father had always preferred him to herself, strange as it might seem, and had encouraged him in his extravagances.
Incidents out of the past flitted before her like panoramic pictures; Chris as a long-legged schoolboy as she had first seen him, Chris in cricketing flannels, making her do all the bowling and fielding while he had the bat, Chris in his first silk hat, daring her to laugh at him—and, last of all, Chris as he had looked at her that day outside Westminster Abbey when he asked her to marry him.
She could remember that he had said, "Well, is the idea too dreadful?" and she supposed now he had said that because the idea had been dreadful to him.
A bachelor husband! It seemed so completely to sum up the situation, and before her eyes rose a dreadful picture of the future in which Chris would be nothing more to her than he had been during the past five years.