The roses, only budding a fortnight ago, had now yearned into June’s deep crimson. The fruit-tree leaves had grown long and grayish, forming an impenetrable screen which shut out familiar perspectives, and gave Geoffrey a sense of strangeness that he liked not. Under the south wall, where the apricots already looked like yellowing, was a turf path leading you fieldward, through the entire length of the garden. Along this path, with unintentionally muffled footsteps, Geoffrey Arbuthnot trod. When he reached the hedge that formed the final boundary between garden and orchard a man’s voice fell on his ear. He stopped, transfixed, as one might do to whom the surgeon’s verdict of ‘No hope’ has been delivered with cruel unexpectedness. The voice was his cousin Gaston’s. Geoffrey had no need to advance farther. In his black clothes, among the trees’ thick leafage, he was himself invisible, could see by the slightest bending of his neck as much as the world in the way of personal misery had on that summer evening to display to him. For there, at the entrance to the orchard, stood Dinah Thurston, the glow that lingers after sunset throwing up the fresh beauty of her head and figure, and there stood Gaston. They were face to face, hands holding hands, eyes looking into eyes. And even as Geoffrey watched them his cousin bent forward and kissed Dinah Thurston’s unresisting lips. Youth, the possibility of every youthful joy, died out in that moment’s anguish from Geff Arbuthnot’s heart. But the stuff the man was made of showed itself. More potent than all juice of grape is pain for evoking the best and the worst from human souls. Desolate, bemocked of fate, he turned away, the door of his earthly Paradise shutting on him, walked back to the scholar’s attic in John’s, whose full loneliness he had never realised till now, and during two hours’ space gave way to such abandonment as even the bravest men know under the wrench of sudden and total loss. During two hours’ space! Then the lad gathered up his strength and faced the position. As regarded himself, the path lay plain. He must work up to the collar, hot and hard, leaving himself no time to feel the parts that were galled and wrung. But the others? At the point which all had reached, what was his, Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s, duty in respect of them? It was his duty, he thought--after a somewhat blind and confused fashion, doubtless--to stand like a brother by this woman who did not love him. Stifling every baser feeling towards Gaston, it was his duty to further, if he could, the happiness of them both. The sun should not go down on his despair. He would see his rival, would visit Dinah Thurston’s lover to-night.