All the happiness--on one side, all the love--was gone now, thought Dinah, as trinket after trinket, memorials every one of them, passed through her fingers. She, who, in the bloom of hope, believed all things, trusted all things, had become harsh, unrelenting, a woman bent, of her own free will, though it cost her her heart’s blood, upon leaving her husband’s side. And Gaston--nay, of him she would think no further ill, to-night, at least! The proofs--little needed--of his light faith she had locked away, witnesses against him until the last hour that both should live. But she would think no new evil of him to-night. She would seek her pillow, leave the preparations for her journey as they stood. Midnight was now drawing near. To-morrow, she thought, when sleep should have renewed her strength, this beginning of her changed existence, this saying of ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ instead of ‘ours’ might come easier. To-day was still to-day. They belonged outwardly, in the world’s sight, to each other yet. There on the bedroom mantelshelf was an unfinished model Gaston had made of her, a sketch which, had it reached marble, might some day have worked its way inside the walls of the Academy. Among the neat proprieties of her dressing-table were two of his modelling tools, not altogether innocent of clay. There lay a half-burnt cigarette ... a glove that he had worn.... Ah, heaven! And with this passionate affection at her heart, she was unloved of him, had no child with tiny tender clasp to make up to her for her husband’s coldness! And she was still only a girl in years; and life but yesterday, it seemed, was sweet. If Gaston, with clairvoyant power, could have seen her at this moment in her extremity of pain, doubt not that the couple of hilly miles between Fort-William and Miller’s Hotel had proved an insufficient barrier to keep him from her side. Common men, however, have common lights to guide them. They reap even as they sow. When twelve o’clock struck and Dinah’s aching head sank on its pillow, Gaston Arbuthnot, with unburthened conscience, was settling himself placidly down to poker--the little game of draw in which he had vouchsafed to act as mentor to the youngsters of the Maltshire Royals. CHAPTER XLIII GEOFFREY CALLS TO BE PAID It was a custom, dating farther back than Andros Bartrand’s childhood, that the Seigneurs of Tintajeux should hold a stiff and formal levée on the first Saturday of every alternate month. The ceremony, shorn of its former old-world stiffness, lingered on, and to the feminine mind was one of the most popular Sarnian entertainments. For Andros Bartrand, with his fine manner, his handsome face, his learning, his temper, was scarcely less a favourite with the sex at fourscore than he had been in the flower of his age, half a century earlier. ‘Will this generation of progress, will the coming democracy ever produce men of eighty like our Seigneur?’ the Guernsey ladies, Conservative to a woman, would ask.