But the blow from his street antagonist had marred Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s looks for life. Strength, loyalty, gentleness, were written large upon his face. His dark, somewhat sunken eyes had in them the glow of an intellect high above the level of his handsome cousin! His smile, though Geff did not resemble the family of Bourbon, was finer, because sweeter, more wholly human than Gaston’s. But his looks were marred. That rugged cicatrice across nose and forehead could never wear out, and Geoffrey possessed not the thousand little drawing-room graces that, in some women’s sight, might go far towards rendering such a blemish ‘interesting.’ His hands, however firm, lithe, adequate for a surgeon’s work, did neither suggest Titian nor Velasquez to your mental eye. His dress bespoke the student. His French was grotesque. Although a second Bayard in his reverence for abstract Woman, he had no small attentions for concrete idle ladies. Garden parties Geoffrey Arbuthnot evaded; dancing parties he abhorred. In regard to matrimony he would shake his head, not holding it a state meet for all men. Concerning this latest clause, however, the reader shall learn more when we come to ask why the triangular friendship of the persons breakfasting together under the shadow of Mr. Miller’s limes was paradoxical. ‘Yes,’ resumed Gaston Arbuthnot, tilting himself to the outside limit of equilibrium on his garden-chair, and clasping his arms, with a gesture admirably suggestive of habitual laziness, above his head, ‘look the position in the face for one moment, and you reduce it to an absurdity. No girl of seventeen has ever yet been a man-hater; has she, Dinah?’ ‘I was not,’ admitted Mrs. Arbuthnot frankly, although she blushed. ‘But Miss Bartrand of Tintajeux, young though she is, has gone through disappointment. Mrs. Miller told me so when I showed her the paper with the advertisement. Miss Bartrand, more than a year ago, was engaged to the major of some English regiment stationed in Guernsey.’ ‘Is that a disappointment, my love?’ ‘The major of the regiment proved a sorry character,’ said Dinah gravely. ‘Miss Bartrand found out that he had broken the heart of some poor girl at a former garrison town.’ ‘And, from that hour forth, swore to look on all men as in the conspiracy,’ interrupted Gaston. ‘What breadth of discrimination, what knowledge of the world, these simple-seeming schoolgirls occasionally show!’ ‘When I was eighteen, that spring I went to stay with Aunt Susan at Lesser Cheriton, I knew no more of the world’s ways than a baby, did I, Geff?’ ‘The philosophers are divided as to how much a baby does know,’ answered Geoffrey, fixing his dark eyes with discrimination upon Mrs. Gaston Arbuthnot’s face.