Yet she must go on enduring. She must not part from Gaston until the dark final curtain shut his face for ever from her sight. What taste could she have for the Devonshire moorlands, the country joys which contented her when she was a girl? No human soul can serve two masters. After knowing passionate love, passionate jealousy, how could she go back to a life of no emotion at all, how share the village interests of people like her father’s folk; simple souls with whom it was a vital point whether the next cake should be made with carraways or with raisins, who could speculate through half a winter as to who would be ‘asked,’ and who wear new bonnets on Easter Sunday, and in whose minds a visit to Exeter, or the yearly house-cleaning, ranked among the larger events of mortal destiny! The poor girl was reluctantly coming to the conclusion--a hard one to realise at her age--that she would not be extraordinarily welcome anywhere, when Geff Arbuthnot, unannounced, as was his habit, entered the parlour. He took in the position of affairs promptly. Dinah’s colourless face, her unoccupied hands, the book lying, as it had fallen, on the floor, told him, with gist passing that of words, that she was in some fresh misery of which Gaston was the cause. Geoffrey’s own heart was sore, his spirit troubled, to-day. A thought distantly akin to that which had newly traversed Dinah’s mind for a moment overcame him. What a little change in the foreordering of things might have re-written the story of both lives! If Dinah Thurston had chanced to love him before his cousin Gaston crossed her path.... ‘Alone--and indoors, Dinah?’ Her Christian name for once slipped from his lips. ‘It is a day,’ quoted Geff, ‘“when it were a sullenness against Nature not to go abroad and see her riches.” Has Gaston returned?’ ‘Gaston and the Thornes have returned. The Cherbourg boat came in long ago. And I have been out--I went down to market before breakfast. I enjoyed the morning wonderfully.’ There was the kind of discrepancy between voice and statement that you might detect in the speech of a man who should declare he had ‘wonderfully enjoyed’ a funeral. ‘And what are you going to do with yourself this afternoon?’ ‘I scarcely know--I am in an idle mood--write to one of the good old aunts in Devonshire, perhaps.’ ‘And Gaston?’ ‘Gaston will not be seen till to-morrow. He has, in the first place, gone out to breakfast. I was not on the pier when they landed, and Gaston ran quickly up here to dress. I only spoke to him for a few minutes outside the hotel. Colonel de Gourmet had waylaid him on the road, it seems, and invited him to breakfast--off red mullet! The temptation, Gaston said, was irresistible.’ A touch of sarcasm was in Mrs. Arbuthnot’s voice. ‘The Guernsey red mullet is not a bad fish,’ retorted Geff with appreciation.