‘You are losing a good deal of blood, Miss Bartrand.’ Taking both her hands, he held them up, in the streak of moonlight, not very distant from his lips. ‘But while there is life there is hope. Three, four, deep wounds! For my sake, don’t faint, if you can help it.’ ‘Faint!’ Marjorie’s laugh was a thing good to hear; a thing fresh as the chatter of birds in April, pungent as the smell of new-turned earth. ‘I wonder whether any of the old Bartrands ever fainted. I mean, _before_ they were guillotined! Confess, we are queer specimens, grandpapa and I, are we not, sir?’ Asking Geff this question, she left her hands in his simply until he should choose to let them go. The first ineffable coldness of girlhood was on her. She knew no more of passion than did her own roses. ‘Not very pleasant people to live with--say! in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir.’ ‘So much must depend on the taste of him who survived the ordeal.’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot quietly surrendered the slim hands resting unresponsively in his. ‘At the present moment life in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir seems to me--endurable.’ A stronger word was very near escaping Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s lips. ‘You are taken in by our picturesqueness,’ said Marjorie with decision. ‘England must be an astonishing ugly country, judging from the effect our bit of Channel rock appears to make upon English people. Now, to me, who have seen Spain, it is all so cramped, so sea-weedy. Look away to the left there--sea. To the right--sea. Move a little step nearer--close here, don’t be afraid, and look where I point across the moor--sea again. Let an out-and-out big wave come some day, and the whole nation would be submerged, like Victor Hugo’s hero.’ The glimpse of silver-gray tranquil moor brought back before Geoffrey the thyme-grown bank, the falcon high poised, the tuft of wood-rush--associated with the last rose visions of the squalid Barnwell pavements, of the men and women, forced deserters from the army of progress, who dragged out their span of human existence there. ‘I should like to know what you are thinking about,’ Marjorie asked, noting with a child’s acumen the changed expression of his face. ‘I am thinking about England, about the hard battles some English men and women have to go through with. A night like this,’ said Geff, ‘brings sharp thoughts before one of one’s own life, one’s own uselessness.’ In an instant Marjorie was softened. Tears almost rushed to her eyes. Her thoughts, true to her better self, followed Geoffrey’s as if by instinct. Then the good impulse passed. It entered her wilful head that this excellent young gentleman from Cambridge meant to sermonise her. She resolved to shock him. ‘I used to feel goody-goody myself, very long ago. You would not believe it, sir, but as a child I was pious.’ ‘I believe it thoroughly,’ answered Geff, grave of countenance.