Taking his cigar from his mouth, the Seigneur of Tintajeux recited a passage from Sophocles in the Oxford Greek accents of sixty years ago, looking about him with the leisurely physical enjoyment of the moment that was more common, probably, at the time of his own youth--a time when Göthe still walked upon the face of the earth--than it is now. Something towering, individual, audacious, was in the old figure. Geff watched the Reverend Andros with admiration. A man so richly vitalised that he could smoke an after-dinner cigar, declaim Greek verse for his own pleasure at eighty--a man who had so proved himself superior to the common shocks and reverses of human life--should be one worth knowing, even though his fine moral equipoise must perforce be studied in the murky and dubious atmosphere engendered by a girl’s temper. Tintajeux Manoir with its weather-bleached walls, its courtly, faded drawing-room, its half lights, its rose scents, had already laid hold of Geoffrey’s imagination. The Seigneur with his antiquated Greek accent, his wise, subtly ironical old face, reciting Sophocles under this late sky, had for him a personal interest. If only the one jarring note need not be struck! If the capricious heiress were but a full-fledged graduate, a resident M.A. say, within the distant walls of St. Margaret’s Hall, or of Girton! Scarcely had the thought crossed Geff Arbuthnot’s mind when he heard a door behind him open and close. Turning quickly, he saw, to his pleasure, a child dressed in a white and red cotton frock, confined by a bright-coloured ribbon round the slim waist, and who advanced to him--a pair of brown, beautifully-carved small hands, outheld. ‘You are ten minutes late, Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’ The faintest un-English accent was traceable in her voice. ‘But you are welcome, a thousand times over, to Tintajeux.’ Now Geff was a veritable child lover, and if this young person had only been two years younger than she looked, he would, likelier than not, have finished several of his life’s best chances by lifting her in his arms and kissing her on the spot. With a little princess of thirteen or fourteen one must be on one’s guard--for the first five minutes, at least, of acquaintance. He took her offered hands and held them, enjoying the arch vivacity of that upturned face, brimful of sunshine as a water lily’s cup; a face good as it was sweet. ‘Poor Cambridge B.A. Poor abashed big coach!’ thought Marjorie Bartrand. ‘The worthy man must be used to cold receptions, I should say, on his wife’s account. Now, let me set him at his ease.’ Crossing to one of the Trianon baskets she softly signed to Geoffrey to follow.