‘Breakfasting, of course, means spending the day at Colonel de Gourmet’s house--until the hour comes round for afternoon teas! And to-night there is a dinner-party at the Fort. Gaston is forced to be there ... to give some of the Maltshire subalterns a lesson in poker. He will not be back till to-morrow, quite out of consideration for me! Gaston thought me looking pale. He did not wish me to have another broken night.’ The speech was delivered with a kind of staccato airiness. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s face became graver and graver while Dinah made it. ‘You are reading, I see, as usual. Why, you will be a confirmed bookworm before long.’ Coming closer, he picked up the volume from the floor. He examined the page at which it opened. ‘“James Lee’s Wife;” I should say you would soon know Mrs. Lee’s history by heart?’ ‘I find something new in it, always. Don’t you think, Geff, so much writing must have gone far to ease her sorrow? Or would writing just come natural to an educated, born lady? In my class,’ said Dinah, ‘if trouble cut us very keen, we should not feel like taking a copy-book to write it down.’ The criticism, from Dinah’s point of view, was just. Geff sought not to controvert it. ‘The prettiest part of all is “Beside the drawing-board.” I was thinking, before you came in, I’d rather be the little girl with the poor coarse hand than write the best poetry ever printed.’ Geoffrey followed the drift of her remark. ‘And Gaston?’ he asked with point. ‘How about his opinion? We cannot look at a single small morsel of our lot, forgetting the rest. If there is one thing Gaston admires more than another in a woman, it is the whiteness and delicacy of her hand.’ ‘All the same, Geff, I hate to live without work, common household work that makes the hands rough and red. Work is the same to me as your books are to you. And you know,’ added Dinah, ‘there must always be a world full of ladies, delicate, white-skinned, fond of idleness, whose finger-tips Gaston could admire.’ The observation gave Geff an inconveniently straight glimpse behind the domestic curtain of his friends’ lives. Moving to the table he became suddenly interested in Dinah’s marketing--the strawberries were in their wicker basket still; the roses hung their heads, as though conscious of neglect, over the rim of an ugly water-jug. You may, generally, prognosticate safely as to the state of a woman’s heart when she treats her flowers lovelessly. ‘They were all for Gaston. You know how he likes to see fresh fruit and flowers on the breakfast-table.’ ‘I know that the strawberries smell uncommonly good. They are to be kept, of course, for Gaston’s return?’ ‘Oh, no.’ Dinah’s voice was blankly indifferent. ‘I don’t care now what becomes of them.’ ‘You would do well to care!’ exclaimed Geoffrey, looking round on her, shortly. ‘There are a good many millions of people in the world, remember, besides Gaston Arbuthnot.’ ‘Geoffrey!’