The words had scarce left Pouchée’s mouth when Geff Arbuthnot entered. He took a rapid glance round him, walked in the direction of the window--Marjorie’s heart thrilled as she crouched, imprisoned, out of sight--then stopped short. There was something of insecurity about his movements. ‘For a moment I was afraid to come in. The front door has become strange to one. But you are really alone, Mademoiselle? Your visitor has started to her party? Then you will let me have five minutes’ chat beside your fire? I have something good to tell you.’ ‘That is right, sir. Please let me set you a chair.’ In performing this little action Pouchée artfully chose such a point that Marjorie, shadowed herself, might gain a full view of Geff Arbuthnot’s face. ‘Your fire makes one feel we are in November.’ He stretched his hands forth to the blaze. ‘How delightful your salon is to-night, Mademoiselle Pouchée.’ Coming in from the mud and darkness, the dreary prose of Cambridge thoroughfares, he might well think so. The room was redolent with the odour of Marjorie’s discarded violets; morsels of muslin embroidery, a thimble never worn by Pouchée’s finger, lay on a work-table near Geff’s elbow. The warmth, the grace, the nameless sweetness of a young girl’s presence, were everywhere. ‘How well that Guernsey photograph looks in its old place!’ Could it be that Geoffrey shrank from pronouncing the name of Tintajeux? ‘You shall not dismantle your walls again for whim of mine.’ Pouchée stirred the fire into a keener flame. She gave a discreet little cough. ‘We will settle about that another day, sir. I wait impatiently your news. Something good about yourself, I hope?’ ‘Something very good.’ His face brightened. ‘You know our poor patient down in Barnwell?’ ‘Our Irish bargee, O’Halloran, the dingiest character even Barnwell can show.’ ‘But whom, when he was at his worst, Mademoiselle Pouchée tended like a sister.’ ‘I sat up one or two nights. I helped--because the good-for-nothing is of my religion. Our priest advised an act of contrition. I had my motives.’ ‘As I had mine,’ said Geoffrey. ‘Never condescend, Mademoiselle, to become a motive-monger. Do you think no experimental zeal mingles with a medical student’s attention to his pauper fellows?’ ‘O’Halloran rewards you, I trust, with gratitude. _That_, at least,’ observed Pouchée, with a touch of cynicism, ‘would be a new experience among ces messieurs of the gutters!’ ‘O’Halloran rewards me with gratitude. The bandages were off him this afternoon for the first time, as you know. Well, he was sitting, propped up in bed, looking at my face with such poor remnant of sight as remains to him, when suddenly--“Doctor! I’m darned,” he cried in his hollow voice, “if it be’ant my Varsity man, after all!”’ ‘Modestly spoken! His Varsity man, indeed!’