‘We might see each other, as friends,’ she stammered--true to a time-worn instinct of her sex, offering a stone for bread, friendship to the man she loved, and who loved her. ‘Surely our work need not be dropped because of this I As long as you stay in the island you will come out to read with me at Tintajeux?’ ‘I shall return to Tintajeux, once more, after to-night,’ was Geff Arbuthnot’s answer. ‘I shall return to shake hands with the Seigneur, and to be paid my money. Good-bye for ever are hard words to speak,’ he went on. ‘But we shall not make the hardness easier by trying to shirk them. We have, virtually, said good-bye already.’ ‘And we are never to be nearer reconciliation than this? You are not a man to change?’ There came a furtive play of feeling upon her mouth. Deep in her heart lurked a formless hope that Geoffrey was not in earnest, that at a smile, a touch of hers, he must yield, if she so willed it. ‘I am a man,’ he answered, ‘to change upon the day you bid me do so. If, at some future time, you think less vile things of me----’ ‘Mr. Arbuthnot!’ ‘Well, or without that. If it should be your whim, in some idle hour, to remember my existence--dare I say, to send me a flower you have worn, a bit of ribbon, a sheet of paper with a single relenting word written on it--you will have only to address your envelope to St. John’s, Cambridge.’ ‘And now, for the remainder of this summer?’ asked Marjorie, drear visions rising before her of a silent schoolroom, of work laboured through without the poignant desire of Geoffrey’s praise. ‘Is it possible that you mean--that you have no other course than to leave Guernsey at once?’ Something in her manner made it seem that she referred their quarrel to him for final arbitration. But Geff Arbuthnot tried his utmost to congeal. His present temper indisposed him for compromise. He had been cut to the quick by that one scornful imputation, that one base utterance of Marjorie’s lips--‘The acres of Tintajeux, few though they be, are matters better worth caring for than Marjorie Bartrand, herself.’ He felt it impossible to forgive her. ‘I shall certainly not leave Guernsey without calling on the Seigneur--to be paid.’ Geoffrey was not superior to a feeling of pleasure in the repetition of these words. They were horribly cruel ones. It might well be, afterwards, that he remembered with remorse how the girl’s slender figure drooped, how her cheeks burned, how her hands fell listlessly upon her knee, one in the other’s palm. ‘And then--for the rest of the vacation, what are your plans?’ she repeated, presently. ‘I have no plans, now. The summer has gone out of my year! Maybe I shall follow in the footsteps of Gaston and his wife. Dinah, I know, would not be sorry to leave this place.’