For very want of breath Marjorie presently stopped short. Geff was at her side in a couple of seconds. The young man caught her in his arms. ‘Mr. Arbuthnot.... Sir!’ ‘I thought it my duty to steady you.’ He liberated her, partially, and with reluctance. ‘Your pace, Miss Bartrand, is killing. Do the Guernsey Sixties ever play hare and hounds? You would make a really respectable hare, I can tell you.’ ‘I hope not.’ With a little air of ill-maintained stiffness Marjorie contrived to put a few more inches between Geoffrey and herself. ‘Who would wish to be anything really respectable, until one gets to the age of the Seigneur, at least?’ ‘We shall both of us be too stiff for hare and hounds by that time.’ Perhaps this was the first hour of his life when Geoffrey Arbuthnot talked nonsense with a child’s sense of enjoyment, a child’s immunity from care. Hard facts, hard work, had made up the sum of his existence hitherto. His staunchest friends complained that he was just a little too grimly lord of himself. In his undergraduate days the men of his year, despite their recognition of his muscular and sterling qualities, had a suspicion that there lurked a skeleton in some hidden closet of Arbuthnot of John’s, a memory, or a dread which rendered the easy philosophy of youth impossible to him. Dinah, who knew him well, Gaston, who knew him better, never saw the look on Geff Arbuthnot’s strong face which lit it in the red freshness of this Guernsey morning. ‘How shamefully we lose the best hours of the day!’ Marjorie’s hand rested, as she spoke, on a wicket-gate, overgrown by sweetbriar, which led into the Manoir gardens. ‘Did you ever smell cherry-pie so sweet before?’ Heliotrope was a passion with old Andros Bartrand. Rows of the odorous purple bloom, profusely flourishing in this generous climate, garnished the borders, even, of his kitchen garden. ‘I, for one, mean to mend my ways. I shall get up with the sun from this day forth.’ ‘Alter my hours, then. We could read together, out of doors, at sunrise, just as well as in the schoolroom at eleven.’ ‘Do you think we should do much serious work, Mr. Arbuthnot?’ Marjorie asked the question with assurance, then coloured up to the roots of her hair. ‘Not unless breakfast were part of the programme,’ said Geoffrey, with discernment. ‘At this moment,’ he added, ‘I am reminded of my schoolboy days in the City. I recall, forcibly, the starvation pangs that used to unman us on dreary winter mornings over the pages of our Latin Grammar and Greek Delectus.’