‘Ah, that has been. The key of our common life is C major--roast duck and green peas--whatever accidental sharps and flats we may deviate into occasionally. The romance has been. I was overcome by the young woman’s singular beauty,’ went on Cassandra. ‘I asked her name, and was rewarded by hearing such an account of them as warmed my heart. The girl belonged to the humblest class of life--a gardener’s daughter, or something of the kind; and Arbuthnot, while he was still an undergraduate at Cambridge, married her.’ ‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’ Marjorie repeated the name softly; a question in her tone rather than in her words. ‘Geoffrey, I presume; that is to say, most decidedly and beyond question, Geoffrey,’ answered Cassandra, with the fatal certitude of inaccuracy. ‘I am the more positive because I felt a kind of love at first sight for the two young people, and made Mrs. Miller give me details. A party of Cambridge men were staying in the hotel when first the Arbuthnots arrived; and some of these men knew the husband by sight. He is looked upon as rather eccentric among his fellows. I am afraid, Marjorie, whenever a man leads a nobler life than other people the tendency of the day is to call him eccentric. And Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s life must be very noble.’ ‘Because he had the courage of his opinions in choosing a wife?’ ‘Not that only. Arbuthnot is a student still at the Cambridge medical school, and gives such time as he has over from study to the most miserable people in the Cambridge streets. Not proselytising, not preaching--for my part I don’t believe much in a preaching young man,’ said old Cassandra, whose opinions tended towards the broad; ‘simply binding up their wounds as men and women. Doing the Master’s work, not talking about it.’ ‘And his beautiful wife helps him!’ exclaimed Marjorie, her sensitive Southern face aglow. ‘Ah, Miss Tighe, thank you again and again for your visit and for telling me this news. In my foolish, trivial, wasted existence, what a splendid bit of good fortune that I should have the chance of knowing two such people!’ Cassandra Tighe looked a little uncomfortable. She prided herself on her freedom from the prejudices of her sex; within limits, really did startle her friends, sometimes, by the free exercise of private judgment. But the liberality of a white-haired lady, whose sixty years of life have run in the safest, narrowest, conventional trammels, may differ widely from the liberality of a hot head, an eager, self-forgetting young heart like Marjorie Bartrand’s.