Christopher stood up. "Thank you," he said, "I believe I did know that, but I have never been reminded of it. I do not know her story: I suppose she did not wish me to know it, but I do know whatever she chose, whatever she did, it was chosen and done because it seemed to her the right course and therefore the only one she could take." Constantia nodded, still gazing at the fire. "Aymer's training on the top of that," she mused, "I suppose you are accounted for." He grew red and looked a boy again. "I should have much to account for if I failed them." "Them?" She swung round. "Caesar and my mother." There was a pause. "And so you will go to Belgium and think?" she said lightly. "No, I shall go to Belgium and work." "You said _think_," she insisted. "I have thought here. I was not sure when I came, but I am now." "May I know what you have thought?" For a moment the strangeness of speaking to her like this held him dumb. How did it happen she should know so much and must know more, she who had been barely a real individual to him before? It bewildered and confused him. He did not understand that the unspoken passionate claim he made on one woman had broken the barriers between him and woman-kind, that because he loved Patricia Connell he could speak to Constantia Wyatt, for they stood together on holy ground. "You have every right. You helped me after all," he said doubtfully, but smiling "I ought not to have hesitated. Caesar is waiting for me to make roads, not to take short cuts." "You think love can better afford to wait than Caesar?" "I have my life before me." "And if you lose her?" "It is settled," he said simply. She drew in her breath. By every law of man he was right, and yet all the woman in her cried out against this decision as falseness to some other law imperfectly understood, but clamorous for recognition. Nevertheless how her heart went out to him for the quiet finality of that refusal to yield to a law not of his own making! She was proud he was so much the handiwork of Aymer, while she recognised the very weakness of his strength. "He will lose her," she mused as she sat alone when he had gone, "and it would break Aymer's heart if he knew, but he won't know. He has succeeded in making a man of him, but, oh, what a nice boy he would have been!" So Christopher turned his back on the great discovery and went to Belgium. Whereupon Patricia complained bitterly, but her golf improved, and Geoffry Leverson, who knew nothing of road-making, started on a very short cut indeed. The Roadmaker remained in Belgium longer than he expected and in the laboratory of a great man stumbled on the key of the discovery that in a few years was to make him famous from one end of Europe to the other.