‘All this time I am not accounting to you for your husband’s disappearance, am I? My dear creature, it was really the drollest thing! Robbie had not as yet floated up with the tide, and Mrs. Verschoyle and I, your husband with us, had made our slippery way across the rocks to mainland. Well, just as Gast ... I mean, as Mr. Arbuthnot was putting a last touch to his sketch, up ran a little Frenchman, full dress, a rose-and-white daughter in each hand, and an enormously stout wife, with a bouquet, following. He threw his arms round your husband’s neck, and but for Mr. Arbuthnot’s presence of mind would certainly have kissed him.’ ‘Kissed!’ ‘Of course. Have you never lived among French people? It was some old artist companion of Gast ... of your husband’s bachelor life. You can imagine the recollections of former joyous days spent in Paris as students together, the inquiries for mutual friends, now dead or married, the history each had to give of his marriage and present happiness!’ ‘I cannot. I am not imaginative.’ It must be confessed that a tinge of displeasure was audible in Dinah’s voice. Every syllable of Mrs. Thorne’s unpremeditated chatter had wounded her like a stiletto prick. ‘Ah--and I am imaginative to my finger tips. We seem the very antithesis of each other, in character, as we are in looks.’ Linda had really a very graceful way of admitting her own plainness, when occasion offered. ‘I can assure you I filled up a dozen little blanks in our Benedicts’ exchange of confidences. I traced out a full and rounded whole most satisfactorily. People may slur over half a dozen years in as many words. If nature has endowed you with imagination, you read between the lines. The barest outline suggests the finished picture.’ Something in her tone would seem to imply that Gaston Arbuthnot’s married life had been a spoiled life, or so it seemed to Dinah’s irritated heart. Dinah felt that the half dozen words must have yielded latent hints of her own intellectual shortcomings, hints which Linda Thorne’s talent for filling up blanks had developed into certainty. ‘The next part of the ceremony was the introduction to Madame de Camors and the children--two small Parisian coquettes, about the age of my Rahnee, who fell in love with Mr. Arbuthnot on the spot.’ ‘Little children fall in love with Gaston always,’ said Dinah hastily. ‘The family party was taking its departure, it seemed, under the broiling sun, to a children’s ball at Luc Casino. At a word from papa the small imps seized a hand each of Gas ..., of Mr. Arbuthnot, and dragged him away _nolens volens_. All children are tyrants,’ generalised Linda, with a dismal yawn, occasioned probably by the recollection of her virtuously spent afternoon, ‘but these terrible French children are the worst of all. Perhaps it is in imitation of the Americans. I consider the way American infants are brought forward in public places is a disgrace to the century.’