As for the engaged couple, Christopher rarely met them. He did not intentionally avoid either Patricia or Geoffry, singly or collectively, but he was not sorry their preoccupation and his separated them. He did not lose his sense of possessorship of Patricia: in his innermost mind she was still his, and Geoffry was but the owner of an outside visible Patricia that was but one expression of the woman who stood crowned and waiting in his heart. There was no question of the wedding, or if there were between themselves, Geoffry was not allowed to voice it. Patricia was enjoying life and in no hurry to forego or shorten the pleasant days of her engagement. Towards the end of September Christopher began to relax his long hours of work and the tense look on his face gave way. "I shall know in about a fortnight if it's coming out all right," he said to Caesar abruptly one day, "and it's a fortnight in which I can do nothing but wait." "Go and play," said Caesar, watching him anxiously, "you concentrate too much. You'll be getting nervous." Christopher laughed and gripped Caesar's hand in his firm, steady grasp. "Never better in my life," he said. "Concentration is an excellent thing. I'm beginning to appreciate Nevil." He spent the next five days in true Nevil fashion, however, following the whim of the moment, and "lazing" as thoroughly as he had worked. Geoffry and Patricia claimed his attendance, or Patricia did and Geoffry made no protest. They were supremely happy days. The three talked of nothing in particular, just the easy surface aspect of the world and the moment's sunshine, and Geoffry was secretly surprised to find his pleasure so little diminished by the third presence. Then one day that wore no different outer aspect to its fellows in their livery of autumn sunshine, the three walked over the wooded ridge to the open downland where the brown windswept turf was interspaced with stretches of stubble and blue-green "roots," where a haze of shimmering light hung over copse and field, and beyond the undulating near country a line of hills purple and grey melted into the sky-line. They had discussed hotly a disputed point as they mounted from the valley and came out on this good land of promise in a sudden silence. Patricia seated herself on the soft turf at the edge of a little chalk pit and sat in her accustomed attitude with her hands folded, looking straight before her, and the two men sat on either side of her. And over all three a sense of the smallness of the matter over which they had differed drifted in varied manners.