‘Did you condescend to notice my manner?’ Geff asked. ‘The whole of that evening, remember, except perhaps for a minute, when you had wounded yourself among the briars, you held me at arm’s-length.’ ‘I thought you a married man, sir. But I liked--I respected you, brusque though you were, because I believed you had had the courage of your opinions, the strength of mind to marry Dinah. How strange,’ she went on, dreamily abandoning herself to his caress--‘how strange it will be, when we are old people, to remember that our acquaintance began in such a comedy of mistakes.’ Because he had had the strength of mind to marry Dinah! The unconscious irony of her speech smote Geff Arbuthnot’s heart. He had been credited, then, as a virtue, with the fulfilment of that mad hope whose frustration took the keenest edge off his life, the intoxication out of his youth! ‘One builds up an ideal, foolishly or wisely,’ went on Marjorie’s happy voice. ‘I had built up mine since I was eight years old. Well, when I heard of a Mr. Arbuthnot who was able enough to have taken high honours, good enough to give up his time to others, brave enough to have married a girl beneath himself in class for the excellent reason that he loved her, when I heard these things--the personal histories of the Arbuthnot cousins cleverly mixed and transposed by poor Cassandra--I felt that my ideal was clothed with flesh and blood. What could I do but care a little for my new tutor?’ ‘Married though the tutor was?’ ‘That is beside the question. I was thinking of his fine qualities only. I held out my hand to him in friendship before we met, even, and I--I know that I was never for one instant in love with Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot.’ Marjorie Bartrand coloured with slightly illogical vexation. ‘Are you quite sure that you are in love at all?’ asked Geoffrey. For a few seconds an uncertain smile trembled round her lips. She drew back from him, half ignorant whether his question had been asked in earnest; then, lifting her eyes, Marjorie encountered the beseeching entreaty written on Geoffrey’s face. There came impulsive, over-quick submission. ‘I mean to love you with my whole soul some day. Does not that content you? Well, then, I mean--if you will give me breathing space--to love you now.’ The midsummer morning was young, the blackbirds called aloud for joy in the Tintajeux orchards, and Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s age was twenty-four. Before they parted, ere Marjorie could repulse him or surrender, he caught the girl in a swift embrace; he kissed her reverently, passionately on the lips. CHAPTER XXXVII A STONE FOR BREAD The kiss cost him dear. A fledgling girl is not, finally, to be captured without a struggle, save by a master hand; and Geoffrey’s was the hand of a prentice.