‘No human being can, honestly, love twice.’ So this was a fixed article in Marjorie Bartrand’s belief! The reflection made Geoffrey pause. Of the belief’s fallacy, his own state of feeling was pertinent evidence. Four years ago he had loved Dinah Thurston with love as ardent as was ever lavished by man on woman. And now this wayward Southern child, with her terrible classics and worse Euclid--this child, with the deep, sweet eyes that promised so much for the future, and the chiselled sun-kissed hands, and the mouth, and the hair--had filled his heart to overflowing. A certain tacit disingenuousness seemed forced upon him. That prettily-told episode of her first engagement, of the Major’s French songs, his presents and his flatteries, was in absolute truth a challenge. But Geoffrey’s conscience smote him not as he let the challenge pass. His passion for Dinah was no ‘fortnight’s mistake.’ It was a part of himself. In losing her he got a wound that he must carry with him to the grave. He could no more have touched upon the theme, lightly, than he could have spoken lightly of his dead mother or of the childish prayers he used to repeat in the shelter of that mother’s arms. The girl he sought as his wife was exquisitely fresh and to be desired. Already, in a brief half-hour, every hope of his future life seemed to have some silken thread of _Marjorie_ woven in its fabric. She was unconnected with his past. The passion that had died, the regret that would never die, were his own. Their history was not to be told, save under dire necessity, of which the present rose-coloured moment gave no forewarning. ‘I knew from the first that you had been engaged to Major Tredennis, and from the first,’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot drew her towards him, tenderly, ‘I began to fall in love with you.’ ‘Not quite from the first?’ Marjorie questioned, artfully ensuring a repetition of the honeyed truth. ‘Not on that evening when you put me through my intellectual paces, when you told me that my classics--save the mark!--were stronger than my mathematics?’ ‘Yes, on that first evening. It was not because of your prettiness, only, or your grace. It was not, even, because you snubbed me so mercilessly. I don’t know why it was. It seemed that a new world had suddenly opened out before me. As I returned along the Gros Nez cliffs, the Tintajeux roses and heliotropes in my hand, I felt like walking right above the mire and commonness of my former life.’ ‘And your thoughts?’ ‘Were of Tintajeux, every yard of the road. Yes, I am clear about it,’ said Geff. ‘I began to fall in love from the first moment that I saw your sweet Spanish face.’ Marjorie shook her head at the compliment. Her looks were sceptical. ‘Your manner, I confess, did not betray you, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she remarked drily.