‘And Gaston’s conscience will be at rest,’ she exclaimed. ‘The truth is, you see, Gaston was not well pleased at my accepting at all. He bade me ask you, Geoffrey, to look after me.’ To a more sophisticated mind than Geff’s it might have occurred that the most fitting man to look after Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife would be--Gaston Arbuthnot himself. CHAPTER XXI ‘IS MY VIRGIL PASSABLE?’ I have written that, in a softened and remorseful moment Marjorie Bartrand’s heart owned Geoffrey for its master. In a character like Marjorie’s, softened and remorseful moods are apt, however, to be intermittent. On the evening of Saturday her pride had melted, ay, to such a point that, holding her tutor’s ‘love-letter’ between her hands, she went into a storm of penitent tears--she, Marjorie Bartrand, whose boast had been that there was one woman in Her British Majesty’s domain who would shed tears for no man while she lived! Looking back upon these things from the cool and bracing heights of a Tintajeux Sunday, the girl’s stout spirit recoiled with derision from the image of her own weakness. The Seigneur’s after-dinner sarcasm, she felt, with tingling cheek, was true of aim. She _had_ played a part, unknowingly, in the Arbuthnot drama: thanks to Cassandra Tighe, had no doubt treated Geoffrey with kindness not his due for the imaginary wife’s sake! Now would everything be on a frigidly proper footing. Her tutor had shown very good sense in returning property that had wrongly fallen into his keeping. Whatever small halo of romance hung around his life was dispelled. The construction of Latin prose, the working out of mathematical problems, would henceforth go on with dignified and scholarlike serenity. But, as a first step, Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth!