Miss Bartrand’s sarcasm had not exaggerated the gravity of the ascent. The man who in an uncertain light should successfully scale Gros Nez must have not only his hands and feet, but his wits thoroughly under command. And here the loop of ribbon attached to Marjorie’s flowers proved of great use. I have tried to represent in Geoffrey a man little moved by the nicer shades of cultivated or hothouse feeling, a man more likely to be wrapped up in one grim fact of the mortuary or dissecting-room than in all the pretty uncertainties of sentiment put together. But to-night a change had certainly passed over him. Before beginning his climb he found a delicate pleasure in suspending Marjorie’s bouquet, exactly in the mode her fingers had taught him, round his neck. He found a pleasure--the cliff’s dizzy height hardly won--in unknotting her ribbon, smoothing it out from its creases with a hand unversed in millinery tasks, finally in hiding it away, jealously, in the breast-pocket of his jacket. Concerning this jealousy he asked himself neither why nor wherefore. In transitional moments like these an old tender image fading even as a new one rises above the horizon, few of us in our inmost thoughts care to be motive-seekers. Geoffrey knew that he would not for an empire have let Dinah see that ribbon to-night, or any other night. He knew that between him and the little girl with carved sweet lips and ebon hair there existed a secret. He knew that tutoring was a far pleasanter business than he had bargained for, also that the flowers Marjorie had given him, and which he carried in his hand, smelt of Tintajeux. But he took out his embroidered tobacco pouch, his short black briar, notwithstanding. He smoked his cavendish vigorously as he trudged back to Petersport. Arbuthnot of John’s might stand on the brink of a flirtation. He was not as yet in a state that need occasion a man’s staunchest bachelor friends anxiety. CHAPTER VIII CROSS-STITCH Dinah was still busied over her embroidery frame when Geoffrey’s entrance brought the coolness of the night, the wholesome odour of heliotropes and roses, into the chronically dinner-oppressed atmosphere of Miller’s Hotel. Her blonde youthful face looked weary. The lightless, far-away expression, which you may always observe as a result of unshed tears, was in the glance she lifted to Geff. ‘What, you are up still! Do you know that it is past eleven, Mrs. Arbuthnot?’ Four years ago, when Geoffrey first saw Gaston and Dinah in the bloom of wedded happiness not two months old, it was decreed by Gaston, least jealous of men, that his wife and cousin should call each other by their Christian names. Upon Dinah’s joyous lips Geoffrey, without an effort, became at once a familiar household word--dear good old Geff, through whom, obliquely, her introduction to the husband she passionately loved had come about!