Old Andros happened to give a longer sermon than usual on this Sunday morning of June 26--a sermon wearing a French garb now, but which was first preached fifty years ago before the University of Oxford, and whose polished sentences breathed the safe and sleepy theology of its day. The whole of the congregation slept, save one; the gentlemanly optimism of eighteen hundred and thirty appealing moderately to hearers who in the evening would revive beneath the burning eloquence of some neighbouring Bethesda or Zion. Marjorie, only, was awake: keen, restless, preternaturally stirred to mundane thoughts and desires as she had ever found herself, from her rebellious babyhood upward, under the inspiration of a high oak pew and monumental slabs. She thought over all her hours with Geoffrey from the first evening when she saw him in the Tintajeux drawing-room until their half quarrel on Saturday. She thought of her visit to Dinah, of the disillusionment wrought in her by the vision of French songbooks and yellow-backed novels. She thought of the moment when she rescued her letter from the Seigneur’s hands! Happily, the comedy of errors approached its finish! Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth, should have his masculine vanity soothed by no further misinterpretation of her conduct. Into a debateable land where a mature woman, her heart already touched, had shrunk from venturing, Marjorie, with the madcap courage of seventeen, resolved to rush. As a first step, Geoffrey Arbuthnot should hear the truth! And this resolution, formed in the dim religious light of the Tintajeux family pew, did not melt away, like too many excellent Sunday purposes, under the secular warmth of work-a-day open air. When Geoffrey walked into Marjorie’s schoolroom on Tuesday morning he found Grim Fate, in a pink chintz frock, with blossoming maidenly face, ready to place him in the outer cold for ever. ‘Good-day to you, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ The girl held herself stiffly upright, with smileless lips, with hands safely embedded in the pockets of her pinafore. ‘I was much obliged to you for returning my ribbon on Saturday, but I need not have put you to the trouble, to the expense of postage! I could have waited until to-day.’ Geoffrey, a backward interpreter always of feminine petulancy, sought for no latent meaning in her words. Marjorie Bartrand had never looked sweeter to him than now, in her fresh summer frock, with a livelier damask than usual on her cheeks, and with her hands cruelly holding back from their wonted friendly greeting. He had it not in his heart, on this June morning, to find a fault in her, inheritress of all the sins of all the Bartrands though she might be. ‘My poverty is heinous, Miss Bartrand, but I could just afford the penny stamp required for the postage of your waist-belt. After the lecture you read me on Saturday morning,’ went on Geff good humouredly, ‘I really dared not face you with that morsel of ribbon still in my possession.’