The third morning Christine answered Sangster’s letter.  She wrote very stiltedly; she said she was sorry to hear that Jimmy was not well, but no doubt he was all right again by this time.  She said she was enjoying herself in a quiet way, and very much preferred the country to London.

“I have so many friends here, you see,” she added, with a faint hope that perhaps Sangster would show the letter to Jimmy, and that he would gather from it that she did not miss him in the very least.

And Sangster did show it to Jimmy; to a rather weak-looking Jimmy, propped up in an armchair, slowly recovering from the severe chill which had made him quite ill for the time being.

A Jimmy who spoke very little, and asked no questions at all, and who took the letter apathetically enough, and laid it by as soon as he had read it.

“You wrote to her, then,” he said indifferently.

“Yes.”

“You might have saved yourself the trouble; I knew she would not come.  If you had asked me I could have told you.  Of course, you suggested that she should come.”

“Yes.”

Jimmy’s eyes smiled faintly.

“Interfering old ass,” he said affectionately.

Sangster coloured.  He was very unhappy about Jimmy; he had always known that he was not particularly strong, and, as a matter of fact, during the past few days Jimmy had grown most surprisingly thin and weak, though he still insisted that there was nothing the matter with him—­nothing at all.

There was a little silence.

“I suppose that’s meant for a dig at me,” said Jimmy presently.  “That bit about having so many friends. . . .  She means Kettering, I suppose.”

“I don’t see why she should,” said Sangster awkwardly.

Jimmy laughed rather grimly.

“Well, it’s only tit for tat if she does,” he said.  “But I thought——­” He did not finish; did not say that he had thought Christine cared too much for him ever to give a thought to another fellow.  He turned his head against the cushions and pretended to sleep, and presently Sangster went quietly away.

He thought that Christine had—­well, not behaved badly.  How could anyone blame her for anything she chose to do or not to do, after what had occurred?  But, still, he was vaguely disappointed in her; he thought she ought to have come—­just to see how Jimmy really was.

But Christine was not thinking very much about Jimmy in those days at all.  Somehow the foreground of her life seemed to have got filled up with the figure of another man; a man whom she had never once seen since that drive over to Heston.

Sometimes she thought she would write a little note and ask him to come to tea; sometimes she thought she would walk the way in which she knew she could always meet him, but something restrained her.

And then one afternoon, quite unexpectedly, she ran into him in the village.