For a space Dinah looked listlessly forth at the garden. It was full of people who knew each other, who talked together in friendly voices--the boarders of the hotel, with whom Gaston mixed, with whom Gaston was popular. Then she seated herself before her embroidery frame. But recollections of Lord Rex Basire, of the effaced stitches, of Gaston’s commentaries on her ‘patience,’ made the thought of work repugnant to her. If she could only read, she thought! Not after her dull, country pattern, repeating each word to herself as a child cons his task ere he can take in its meaning. If she could read for pleasure, as she had watched Geoffrey read--quickly, easily, with hearty human interest, like one bent on receiving counsel from some well-beloved friend! A book of Geff’s lay on the mantelshelf. Dinah rose, crossed the room with languid steps, and took it in her hand. Then, as readers invariably do, to whom the shell of a book matters more than the kernel, she fell to a careful examination of the text, binding, title-page. ‘The Poetical Works of Robert Browning. Vol. VI. _Dramatis Personæ_.’ Well, four years ago, during the brief fortnight of Geoffrey’s madness, it chanced one evening that he walked out to Lesser Cheriton with this very book in his pocket. (Did some ineffaceable rose odour of that dead June cling to the pages still, rendering Vol. VI. dearer in Geff’s imagination than its fellows?) He read ‘James Lee’s Wife’ aloud to Dinah Thurston--a poem totally outside the girl’s comprehension--and during the recital of which her decently suppressed yawns must have rebuffed any man less blindly in love than was Geoffrey Arbuthnot. At ‘James Lee’s Wife’ the book opened now. ‘_Ah, Love, but a day,_ _And the world has changed!_’ Dinah read through the first stanzas untouched. Pretty love-warblings, the cry of a happy woman’s heart,--what had they to say to her, Dinah Arbuthnot? In the last stanza of ‘By the Fireside’ her pulse gave a leap. ‘_Did a woman ever--would I knew!--_ _Watch the man----_’ Dinah went back to the window, the volume in her hand. She returned to the beginning of the poem, pored over it, line by line, stanza by stanza, in the fading light. ‘_Yet this turns now to a fault--there! there!_ _That I do love, watch too long,_ _And wait too well, and weary and wear;_ _And ’tis all an old story, and my despair_ _Fit subject for some new song._’ And when she had got thus far, the clouds of her ignorance lightened. She began to understand.