Dinah rested her hand upon her husband’s shoulder, but not with the clinging, imploring touch to which Gaston Arbuthnot was accustomed. ‘If I could have an answer to one question I should be content,’ she exclaimed, almost with passion. ‘It is an answer you can give. What are Mrs. Thorne’s gifts? What is the cleverness which draws a man as difficult to please as you five days a week to her house?’ The situation had become critical. A feverish colour burned on Dinah’s face, her question was trenchant and desperately to the point. But it was just the hardest thing imaginable to get Gaston Arbuthnot into a tiptoe posture. The drama of his life, so he himself avowed, consisted, a good nine-tenths of it, of carpenter’s scenes. If he were forced to declaim some passage of high and tragic blank-verse it would inevitably sound like a bit of genteel comedy from his lips! A husband of warmer temper, it would be unjust to say of warmer heart, must have kindled at the daring of Dinah’s words, the ardent eagerness of her face. Gaston Arbuthnot was interested rather than moved. He answered with the chill candour of an impartial judge: ‘Linda’s gifts? First on the list we must place the cardinal one of vocal silence. Mrs. Thorne does not sing.’ ‘She can accompany other people who do,’ said Dinah, with imprudent significance. ‘And can accompany them well. Have I ever told you, Dinah, how and where I first saw the lady who is now Doctor Thorne’s wife?’ ‘You have not. You have never spoken to me about Mrs. Thorne’s life, past or present.’ Dinah’s tone was as nearly acrid as her full and rounded quality of voice permitted. She felt intuitively that Gaston would parry her question, as he had so often done before, by apposite narrative which yet led no whither; felt that though every word he spoke might be true to the letter, the one truth of vital moment to herself would be in the words left unspoken. ‘It was in Paris, my love, in long past days before I went to Cambridge, and when I was much less of an Englishman than I am now. My mother, with a wholesome dread of my artist friends, and of the Quartier Latin, cultivated what she called occasions of family life for me. One such occasion came to her hand. Under the same roof with us, but on a lower floor, as befitted their purse, lived a rich Jew family, with a bevy of young daughters and an English governess----’ ‘Linda Thorne?’