The complexion of the family talk was threatening; Geoffrey Arbuthnot hastened his adieux. But Andros had still a farewell shot to discharge against the little witch. ‘Our poor benighted Spain is the one country in Europe with a decent peasantry of its own. Get Mr. Arbuthnot, get anyone who understands the matter, to talk to you about the English ploughman, and compare the two pictures. The Spanish peasant’s wife sews, knits, embroiders, reads her Mass-book and can cook a capital stew. Her drink is water. Infanticide is unknown. The men are hospitable, courteous, dignified. Among benighted people like these, Marjorie Bartrand proposes to preach the benefits of a liberal pauper education as exhibited in England.’ By the time the Seigneur’s ironies came to an end Marjorie’s small figure had vanished among the deepening shadows of the lawn. Fearful of losing sight of her altogether--for, indeed, Marjorie Bartrand was suggestive of something weird, sprite-like, and of a nature to take other form at an hour when owls do fly--Geff bade his host a hasty good-night and followed. The girl herself was invisible, but a clear childish voice chanted the old ditty of Roland somewhere in the neighbourhood, ‘Like steel among weapons, like wax among women.’ Or, as Marjorie sang with spirit: ‘Fuerte qual azero entre armas, Y qnal cera entre las damas.’ ‘I have found my gardening scissors, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she cried, emerging through the schoolroom window, a basket on her arm. ‘Flowers smell sweetest that are cut with the dew on them. I mean to cut some roses and cherry-pie for--for----’ ‘Your wife,’ was on Marjorie’s lips, but she stopped herself abruptly, all Cassandra Tighe’s warnings about Geoffrey’s domestic embarrassments coming back to her. ‘Let me help you,’ said Geoffrey. A minute later Marjorie, on tiptoe, was vainly endeavouring to catch a bough of swaying yellow briar. ‘You are just one foot too short to reach those roses, Miss Bartrand.’ Marjorie sprang up in air. She plunged with bold final grasp among the thorns, and succeeded in getting scratches destined to mark her right hand for some weeks to come; scratches that might, perhaps, recall this moment to both of them in the pauses of some tough mathematical problem, some arid point in Latin grammar or Greek delectus. ‘The result of over-vaulting ambition.’ Thus from his calm altitude of six-foot-one Geff moralised. ‘How many roses am I to pick?’ ‘You are to pick three beauties!’ said Marjorie, somewhat crestfallen. ‘Won’t you have the scissors? These briars prick cruelly.’ But Geff wanted no scissors; his skin, so he told her, was of about the same texture as a stout dog-skin glove. When the briar-roses were duly laid in Marjorie’s basket he put on the grave manner of his profession. It was his duty as a surgeon to make immediate inspection of her injuries.