By this time they had passed the last straggling houses of Langrune. Fair level country, the fields already on the edge of harvest, spread around their road. Along the wayside path was a very mosaic of brilliantly blended hues, the corn-flowers blue and purple, the scarlet poppies, the white and gold of the wild camomile making up the purest chord of colour. A slight south-west wind, dry and elastic after its transit over so many a league of sunny land, was invigorating as wine. ‘How the spirit rises the moment one treads real solid earth!’ cried Marjorie Bartrand. ‘I feel at this moment like walking straight off to Spain, the country I love and where my life will be spent! Why, with twenty francs apiece in our pockets, and camping out by night under stacks or hedges, you and I might easily reach the Peninsula on foot, Mrs. Arbuthnot.’ Dinah’s geography did not embolden her to hazard a contradiction. Something in Marjorie Bartrand’s tone jarred on her reasonlessly. It were hard to believe that she considered Geff a man likely to fall in love. Had not the conditions of her life for years put speculations as to Geoffrey’s future happiness on one side? And still, a true daughter of Eve in every weakness belonging to the passion, Dinah was an inchoate match-maker. She would fain have seen the whole world blest with such fireside beatitude as constituted her own ideal of highest good. With firm and true perception she had noticed a dozen trivial things of late, all proving Geff’s imagination, if not his heart, to be in his teaching of Latin and Greek at Tintajeux Manoir. She had hoped that the notice taken of herself by Marjorie was an earnest of the pupil’s liking for her master, had furtively and with misgiving dug the foundations of many an air-castle that Marjorie and Geff, at some far-off day, might jointly inhabit. The girl’s diatribes against domestic slavery, her open avowal of love for Spain and of her hopes of spending her life among Spanish people, caused a troubled look to come on Dinah’s face. ‘Your plans don’t point towards an English home, Miss Bartrand. Yet I think Geoffrey has told me you mean to study at Girton?’ ‘To fit myself for my future work--yes. The Spanish school-boards are just as conservative as English ones. A young woman armed with Cambridge certificates would have more chance of coming to the front than another, equally strong-minded, who should rely on her own merits.’ ‘Strong-minded!’ Dinah ejaculated with horror. ‘At your age, with all the sweet happiness of life still to come, you talk, as though you approved such things, of being strong-minded?’ Marjorie swept off the heads from a cluster of wayside camomile flowers with the stick of her sunshade. An expression of will which yet was neither unlovely nor unfeminine glowed upon her girlish face. ‘Let us understand each other better, Mrs. Arbuthnot. It may well be that our notions of “sweet happiness” are not the same.’