Marjorie’s lips lost their firmness. Taking her place at the schoolroom table, she cleared her throat twice. Then she pushed across a pile of copy-books in Geoffrey’s direction. She signed to him to be seated, presented him with a bundle of pens, drew forward the inkstand. Finally, intrenched, as it were, behind the implements which defined their social relationship, she delivered herself of the following singular confession: ‘When my lecture, as you please to call it, was given I did not know that _you_ existed, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’ ‘Miss Bartrand!’ ‘The lecture was meant, in good faith, for another person. If an apology is needed, there you have it! I--I had listened to idle gossip,’ said Marjorie, taking desperate courage at the sound of her own voice, ‘and so--I must say it out, little though I like such subjects--I thought you were a married man, sir. I thought so from the first evening you came here. I thought so until the hour when I saw Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot at the rose-show.’ ‘And your motives--when you called on Dinah?’ exclaimed Geoffrey, thrown off his guard. ‘When I called on Mrs. Arbuthnot I believed her to be my tutor’s wife. I had heard a great deal about her goodness and her beauty. And I had almost grown to hate you,’ added Marjorie, with one of her terrible bursts of outspokenness, ‘for leaving such a woman as Dinah at home, neglected, while you amused yourself.’ Then she lifted her eyes. She was startled to see how Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s face had paled; paled under the incivility, so Marjorie supposed, of her speech. ‘As a fact, of course, I never hated you at all.’ Her voice shook a little. ‘That gentle, beautiful Mrs. Arbuthnot is not your wife.’ ‘Not my wife,’ echoed poor Geoffrey absently. His tone was chill. Dipping a pen in the ink, he began to trace meaningless curves and lines on the cover of the exercise-book nearest his hand. During a few seconds he was obviously unmindful of his pupil’s presence. ‘Her lips, with their sad expression, haunt me,’ remarked Marjorie presently. ‘Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot, I should think, must be the most beautiful woman in the world.’ ‘As she is certainly the truest and best.’ Geff had got back his self-possession. He spoke his credo as valiantly as though Marjorie Bartrand’s eyes were not fixed upon him. ‘And so,’ he found voice to say, ‘you could actually believe, on hearsay evidence, that a girl like Dinah would have chosen me for her husband, and I--have neglected her?’ Geoffrey laughed, not very joyously; then, taking up another copy-book, he glanced with mechanical show of attention over a sentence or two of Marjorie’s Latin translation. He held the page upside down--a fact which her memory, in after times, might recall as significant. ‘I honestly believed you to be married. Have you forgotten the first evening you walked out to Tintajeux--that evening when I told you the Bon Espoir was a good omen for our friendship?’