He drove for some way in silence. Patricia was too much absorbed in the pleasures of swift motion to talk. Her first words, however, shut down the mists on him again. "Geoffry must have a car," she declared. "He must get one just like this." "I thought Geoffry was to be left behind this afternoon?" "Oh, I suppose he was. I don't believe you are a bit pleased about it really, Christopher." He clutched at the truth as a plank of safety. "Well, you can't expect me to be glad to lose your company, can you? I shall never make a golfer now." She laughed at that and recommended a course at St. Andrew's under a professional, which proposal he treated with scorn, but after a short silence he said in a different voice: "Don't think I'm not glad at anything that makes you happy, Patricia. Geoffry's a real good sort and--here's a town--you must not speak to the man at the wheel." Patricia was obedient. She sank into a reverie in which, despite her own determination, Geoffry played a long part. It was characteristic of her exact attitude towards her accepted lover that it was the immediate future in which he figured most clearly. Her thoughts hovered round the pleasant summer to come with the distant excitement of a wedding to crown it. She never considered, or only in the most cursory way, the long years ahead, the daily companionship with the man she had chosen. She was honestly attached to Geoffry. She believed she was in love with him, whereas, as is far more often the case than the young suppose, she was in love with the love that had come to her in the glory of the spring, offered by familiar hands that were dear because of what they held for her. So they drove through the glowing afternoon, and the line of white road before them appeared to Christopher as a track dividing past and future, the thin edge of the passing minutes. They spoke no more, however, on the forbidden subject. Christopher presently explained to her the visible mechanism of the car and on a stretch of clear road let her put her hands on the wheel beneath his own and feel the joy of fictitious control. Before the sun quenched itself in the sea they stood on the Cliff Edge and looked out across the shining waters into the great space, where a thought-laden air renews itself, reforming, cancelling and creating in the crucible of Life. They clambered down from the lip of the cliff on to a jutting-out shelf of rock, screened with gorse, where the few feet of gravel bank behind them shut out all signs of habitation.