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“Yes,” said Simon Beaulieu. “You mean that in love, as in everything else in the world, the positive’s easier to deal with than the negative. Better a Dead Sea apple than only forbidden fruit.”

“And you say we shouldn’t get on!” said Patricia deliberately.

There was a silence.

Shoulder to shoulder, the two stood still as statuary, looking into the night. For such an exercise their coign of vantage was superb. The balustrade before them severed the gardens from the park. This for the most part was walled with rising woods, but here the ground fell sharply into a valley which ran like a giant gutter, straight and clean, to the jaws of Peering Gap. Such was the darkness that the gap was not to be seen, but a starlit scallop of sky showed where it lay.

At length—

“We mightn’t,” said Simon doggedly.

“I mightn’t get on with George. Or you with Estelle.”

“You won’t,” said Simon Beaulieu. “Neither shall I. There won’t be any question of getting on. Our respective unions will be marriages of convenience, business deals. They’ll proceed mechanically, like a couple of cars. Now and again some slight adjustment’ll be made, but, in the ordinary way, so long as they’re watered and fed, they’ll go right on. The chauffeur’ll do his bit and the car’ll do hers. No understanding will be necessary—there’ll be nothing to understand. If you stick to your book of instructions, it’s a fool-proof show. But ours—our marriage would have been like a man on a horse, journeying over the world day in day out, sharing fair weather and foul and getting to know each other inside out. Well, they get on or they don’t—a man and his horse. It’s a question of temperament. And there ain’t no book of the rules for dealin’ with temperaments.”