Dinah raised her clasped hands deprecatingly. Her speech failed her. Now, in the moment when she needed strength, self-control most, they proved traitors. She could only sit, faint, cold, sick, only hear the details of her own passionate wish put into calm, reasonable--ay, and generous detail by Gaston. ‘For the first year,’ he repeated, ‘until I become a steadier worker, could you make an allowance of two hundred pounds suffice?’ ‘I want nothing but a few pounds at first,’ said Dinah, with a desperate effort. ‘After that I will work--plain sewing, out-door work, anything they can find for me to do.’ ‘You might get plain sewing and out-door work, too, without going as far as Tavistock Moor.’ ‘But I am known there. I am not the sort of woman--I mean as yet--to make my way alone among strangers.’ ‘You shall neither go to Tavistock Moor nor among strangers. You shall remain with me.’ Gaston said this with slow emphasis. ‘The law is on my side.’ Poor Dinah started up. The world seemed to float away from before her. A piteous look in which--yes, amidst all its anguish--there was a tremble of hope, went across her blanched face. ‘My sins have been grievous enough, the sins of carelessness and selfishness--they have not gone deeper. Let the future make up for them. Forgive me, Dinah!’ Arbuthnot’s arms were opened wide. ‘I could not work, I could not live without you. I love you better than my life.’ With a cry as of a child taken back, unexpectedly, to the lost shelter of home, Dinah fell upon his breast. CHAPTER XLVI A BYE-TERM MAN But no such good thing as reconciliation fell to Marjorie Bartrand. Within a week of Geoffrey’s departure Dinah and her husband, bride and bridegroom once more, started joyously on their way to Italy. There was a little wonder among the few people who had known them, a little hypothetic gossip, an unjust suspicion, perhaps, that Linda Thorne could clear up more secrets than one, ‘as she listed.’ And then Guernsey knew the name of Arbuthnot no more. Marjorie Bartrand must take up life at its old point before love, before disappointment made acquaintance with her--must stand, chill and alone, in the same Arcadia where she stood beside Geoffrey on the morning of their one day’s engagement; must work under a new teacher in the schoolroom where every book, every window-pane, spoke to her of the past, and of the sharp irrevocableness of her loss.