‘And you don’t care--you are not one bit sorry at giving her up? Do you know, Geoffrey, I had begun to hope----’ ‘Miss Bartrand will be a Girton girl before long,’ interrupted Geoffrey. ‘Happily,’--he paused--‘she is not without self-reliance, has more than a woman’s share, perhaps, of ambition. When we see each other next it will be as fellow-students in Cambridge.’ Dinah knew the tone of his voice. It was not a tone that invited discussion. ‘Your leaving is an ill stroke of luck for me, Geff. Day by day Gaston’s engagements seem to grow upon him. My time will be emptier than ever when you are gone.’ ‘You may fill it, full as time can hold. I thought as I watched you charming poor Jack out of knowledge of his pain that you had missed your vocation. You should be a nurse. Yours are the ideal face and voice and tread that we want in the hospitals. If you ever harbour thoughts of emancipation, or of a mission,’ said Geoffrey, ‘remember my hint.’ ‘When Gaston has used the last line that can be modelled from my face, for instance?’ The smile was flickering with which Dinah hazarded the surmise. ‘When Gaston has got his last inspiration from your face! Unluckily for the hospitals, that day will not come quite yet. A woman with a mission should have no such vexatious encumbrance as a husband or a lover.’ For once, Geoffrey’s tone was cynical. He recalled his parting with Marjorie Bartrand over-night. CHAPTER XL AT THE BUNGALOW And all this time an offer of truce lay on the mantelshelf of Dinah’s parlour; an offer directed to himself in the handwriting whose Greek e’s, whose girlish assumption of scholarship, Geoffrey’s heart knew! Can we wonder at the pagan notion that the gods must needs hold their sides for laughter when they gaze down on the ever-twisted plot of our little lives? Geoffrey and Dinah were within a hundred feet of Miller’s house. Five minutes more and Geff must have been lifted--this time into quite other than a Fool’s Paradise, when, abruptly, a new actor, jauntily floating in cobweb Indian silk, gleaming under a scarlet sunshade, with eight-buttoned gloves, with airs, with graces innumerable, made her entrance upon the scene. Mrs. Thorne’s manner was confident to-day, as of one with whom the world goes well. She ran skittishly down the steps leading from the hotel garden. She paused, tapping a high-heeled shoe in pretty impatience on the gravel. She looked this way and that, expectantly; at length, it would seem, decided, with a little merry shake of the head, for the chances of town over country. Then, with such ease of tread as high-heeled shoes are apt to confer on ladies whose summers are increasing, she commenced the steep descent of the hill. ‘I hope Mrs. Thorne has not been calling on me. I hope, if we stop, she will make me no pretty speeches,’ said Dinah under her breath. ‘I could not bear them just now. If Mrs. Thorne makes pretty speeches, I shall say something true to her.’