These half confessions of Dinah’s were no new experience to him. She never uttered an ungenerous suspicion of Gaston, never made a complaint as to her own neglected life. And still a kind of moral moan had of late been constantly in poor Dinah’s talk. The warm woman’s heart, ill at rest, jealous, with no wholesome work or interest to keep emotion subordinate, was always, unconsciously, on the brink of betraying its secret. He looked with pity that could never tire at her averted face. ‘You, Geff?’ she cried, putting on a brighter tone. ‘Why, you were on my side, of course. You do everything good that is done for me in this world. Through you, for certain, Miss Bartrand came all the way from Tintajeux to call on me.’ ‘Don’t give me credit on that score. Marjorie Bartrand’s doings are guided by no living person save Marjorie Bartrand. She had made up her mind to know you; had heard, doubtless, about you and Gaston among the islanders, and of her own free will sought you out. Count me for nothing,’ said Geoffrey Arbuthnot, ‘in any action or caprice of Marjorie Bartrand’s.’ ‘Had heard about me and Gaston!’ Dinah repeated his words with the preoccupation of morbidly strained feeling. ‘I think one may know pretty well what that means. No wonder so many people turned round to look at me at Saturday’s rose-show.’ ‘People turn to look at you generally, do they not, Mrs. Arbuthnot? There is as much human nature, depend upon it, in the heart of the Channel as in Hyde Park or Piccadilly.’ ‘That is more like a speech of Lord Rex Basire’s than of yours!’ cried Dinah, with a laugh unlike her own. ‘Throw in a lisp, varnished shoes, a waistcoat, and a double eyeglass, and I could believe it was his lordship, not Geff Arbuthnot, who was condescending to talk to me.’ ‘You must have put forth all your charity, have exercised a great deal of wasted patience, in allowing his lordship to condescend at all.’ Chiefly through Gaston’s spirited character sketches over the breakfast table, Geoffrey had long ago known with certainty what manner of man Lord Rex Basire was. Instead of answering, Dinah stooped above a head of garden lilies, the dense white of whose petals showed waxen and spotless through the gloom. ‘I like the smell of lilies better than of all other flowers that blow,’ so after a minute her rich low voice came to Geoffrey; ‘I can never smell them, nor yet lavender, without thinking of Aunt Susan’s garden at Lesser Cheriton.’ Where Geff first saw her! The garden amidst whose crowding summer verdure he stood at the moment when his youth went from him, when Dinah and Gaston, hand clasped in hand, bent towards each other in the level sunlight. At this hour, with the whispers of a new love stirring in his heart, Geoffrey Arbuthnot could not hear that distant time spoken of, above all by Dinah’s lips, without a thrill of the old passion, the old maddened, blinding sense of loss overcoming him.