He could give her Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. They gravely arranged their hours. They talked over the work--say, a book of Cicero, the two first books of Euclid--to be looked over before their first lesson. Then Geoffrey Arbuthnot rose to his feet. Putting on a staid and tuitional manner, he stated that his terms in Guernsey, would be five shillings, _British currency_, per hour. Marjorie’s face grew one hot blaze of shame. ‘Oh! of course--please do not speak of money. It is far too little. It is an honour, I mean, for me to learn, and I am coming----’ She was just about to commit herself, and so considerably simplify Geff’s position--just about to blurt out, ‘and I am coming to call upon your wife,’ when a footstep, alert, though it had paced the earth for more than eighty years, sounded on the garden path outside. The glass door of the schoolroom was pushed open, and old Andros Bartrand walked in. CHAPTER VI TWO IN ARCADIA An atmosphere of fresh country air, blent with tobacco smoke, surrounded him, as we like to think it surrounded Parson Adams. He saluted Geff with that nice mixture of personal reserve and general expansiveness which among a bygone generation was called breeding. He bestowed a partial smile on Marjorie (‘those Bartrand company smiles,’ as she used to bemoan, when she was a younger child. ‘Counters that I must make believe are sixpences until the visit is over, until the round game melts back into our grim duel at solitaire’). ‘Mr. Arbuthnot, I presume? Welcome to Tintajeux, Mr. Arbuthnot.’ He shook Geff’s hand with a distant affability. ‘Glad always to see a man from the Alma Mater in our little island. Oxford is not the Oxford of my days, still----’ ‘Mr. Arbuthnot hails from Cambridge, grandpapa,’ shrieked Marjorie with energy in the Seigneur’s deafer ear. ‘Then, in one sense, Mr. Arbuthnot is to be congratulated, for Cambridge is nearer to Newmarket. A bitter blow to the talent that victory of Mademoiselle Ninette’s in the One Thousand, last April, was it not?’ ‘The proverbial uncertainty of fillies retaining their form,’ said Geoffrey. ‘The usual reason for strong fielding. Still, the performance of Maydew in the Two Thousand was so good that the odds seemed legitimate.’ Geff Arbuthnot cared as much for horse-racing as for the native industries of Japan. But the tastes of a man of fourscore must be respected. And with a glance at the Seigneur of Tintajeux you could detect the sporting element, softened, not ungracefully, through a course of sixty years by the learning of the scholar and the quiet life of the priest. ‘You come over to England, of course, sir, for the big events of the year?’