“Pray, where did you read that?” said Charteris.

“I didn’t read it anywhere.  It was simply a thought that came to me,” Patricia lied, gently.  “But don’t let’s try to be clever.  Cleverness is always a tax, but before luncheon it is an extortion.  Personally, it makes me feel as if I had attended a welsh-rabbit supper the night before.  Your wife must be very patient.”

“My wife,” cried Charteris, in turn resolved to screen an unappreciative mate, “is the most dear and most kind-hearted among the Philistines.  And yet, at times, I grant you—­”

“Oh, but, of course!” Patricia said impatiently.  “I don’t for a moment question that your wife is an angel.”

“And why?” His eyebrows lifted, and he smiled.

“Why, wasn’t it an angel,” Patricia queried, all impishness now, “who kept the first man and woman out of paradise?”

“If—­if I thought you meant that——!” he cried; and then he shrugged his shoulders.  “My wife’s virtues merit a better husband than Fate has accorded her.  Anne is the best woman I have ever known.”

Patricia was not unnaturally irritated.  After all, one does not take the trouble to meet a man accidentally in a plantation of young beech-trees in order to hear him discourse of his wife’s good qualities; and besides, Mr. Charteris was speaking in a disagreeably solemn manner, rather as if he fancied himself in a cathedral.

Therefore Patricia cast down her eyes again, and said: 

“Men of genius are so rarely understood by their wives.”

“We will waive the question of genius.”  Mr. Charteris laughed heartily, but he had flushed with pleasure.

“I suppose,” he continued, pacing up and down with cat-like fervor, “that matrimony is always more or less of a compromise—­like two convicts chained together trying to catch each other’s gait.  After a while, they succeed to a certain extent; the chain is still heavy, of course, but it does not gall them as poignantly as it used to do.  And I fear the artistic temperament is not suited to marriage; its capacity for suffering is too great.”

Mr. Charteris caught his breath in shuddering fashion, and he paused before Patricia.  After a moment he grasped her by both wrists.

“We are chained fast enough, my lady,” he cried, bitterly, “and our sentence is for life!  There are green fields yonder, but our allotted place is here in the prison-yard.  There is laughter yonder in the fields, and the scent of wild flowers floats in to us at times when we are weary, and the whispering trees sway their branches over the prison-wall, and their fruit is good to look on, and they hang within reach—­ah, we might reach them very easily!  But this is forbidden fruit, my lady; and it is not included in our wholesome prison-fare.  And so don’t think of it!  We have been happy, you and I, for a little.  We might—­don’t think of it!  Don’t dare think of it!  Go back and help your husband drag his chain; it galls him as sorely as it does you.  It galls us all.  It is the heaviest chain was ever forged; but we do not dare shake it off!”