Interpreting Froissart French by such lights as he possessed, Geoffrey learned from an ancient goat-tending peasant dame that a neighbouring block of stone building, partially visible on the left through oak and larch plantations, was Tintajeux Manoir. Would the girl who awaited his visit there be blonde or dark? Something Mrs. Thorne had hinted about a Spanish mother. According to all mournful human probabilities, the heiress would be swarthy; a black-eyed, atrociously clever-looking young person, he thought, with shining hair drawn tightly from her forehead, with stiff linen collar and wristbands, with a dignified manner and inkstained fingers. Also, despite her seventeen summers, with a leaning towards stoutness. Geoffrey disrelished the picture projected before his mental sight about as much as in his present buoyant physical state he could disrelish anything. Consulting his watch, he found with relief that he had reached the outskirts of Tintajeux five-and-twenty minutes too early. There would be time, amidst this delicious wealth of atmosphere and hue that flooded him around, for a quiet smoke before encountering the terrible presence of Miss Marjorie Bartrand! A suspicion that the heiress’s peppery temper might be roused if one’s jacket smelt of tobacco rather heightened the alacrity with which Geff Arbuthnot threw himself down on the fragrant sward and produced his pipe and pouch. The pipe was a black, ferociously Bohemian-looking ‘bulldog,’ the pouch a delicate mass of silk embroidery and velvet. As he drew forth--alas! that I should have to say it, his strong-flavoured cavendish, Geoffrey thought, as it was his custom to think four or five times each day, of the tender friendly woman’s hand that worked this pouch for him--Dinah’s! Poor Dinah! When he saw her last, an hour before, her hands were clasped together with the half-apathetic gesture of a person to whom moral suffering has become a habit. A basket of coloured wools stood before her on the table, ready for her evening’s cross stitching. Round the corners of her lips was the look of silent endurance which had become so painfully familiar to Geoffrey’s sight. And all this for what? There was no great sin, surely, in Gaston’s putting himself at once under Mrs. Thorne’s easy guidance. The happiest households one hears of, thought Geoffrey, striking a vesuvian, are those in which the broadest law of liberty obtains. Does not an artist, more than other men, want change, professionally? Dinah should know that a creator, of the cheap popularity order, as Gaston with his pleasant self-depreciation would say, must have a constant supply of straw for his brickmaking; must have material, ‘stuff,’ must see brisk lights, sharp shadows that the calm twilight of domestic happiness does not yield. And yet.... It was that constant, unspoken ‘and yet’ in Geoffrey’s mind which, up to the present point, had rendered the close friendship of the three Arbuthnots a paradox.