‘And your evening, snubbing and all, has been passed pleasantly?’ ‘I have breathed ampler air,’ Geoffrey made evasive apology, man-like. ‘I have seen more blue sea and sky than ever in my life before. Miss Bartrand’s snubbing was--not beyond my strength. The Seigneur of Tintajeux is a specimen of the old scholarly, high-and-dry parson, worth walking any number of Guernsey miles to see. Some day, Mrs. Arbuthnot, I shall take you with me to Tintajeux.’ ‘To come in for my share of snubbing too?’ Dinah asked the question, faintly colouring. ‘Marjorie is a frank, generous-hearted child. You cannot think of her in the light of a grown-up woman. She is a Bartrand, with the faults and virtues of her inheritance, the faults--pride and temper--visibly on the surface. I am very sure,’ added Geff, bending his head, as though to examine the intricate shading of Dinah’s poppies, ‘that you and Marjorie Bartrand might be fast friends, if you chose.’ ‘I have no friends,’ said Dinah, ‘except my own people, down home,’ of whom, in truth, Gaston allowed her to see little enough,’and--and you, Geff.’ The voice was unfaltering, the full good mouth was steady. Dinah made the admission, not as a matter of complaint, but of fact, and Geoffrey’s heart fired. ‘That “friendlessness” is the one huge mistake of your life,’ he exclaimed. ‘Gaston is not selfish, would not be selfish, unless your unselfishness forced him into being so. You should never have allowed this morbid love of solitude to grow on you. You ought to assert yourself, to go into the world at Gaston’s side, whether you like it or not.’ ‘I should not like it now. When I was a girl, when we first married, my heart was light, against what it is now. It was the end of the London season, you remember. No, I don’t suppose you do?’ Did he not, though--that late July time when, after seeing the marriage ceremony over, he went back to his scholar’s attic in John’s; that Long Vacation when the skies were brazen to him, when day and night alike were one feverish pain! ‘It was the end of the London season, and when Gaston took me to the Opera and twice down to dinner at Richmond I did feel,’ confessed Dinah with humility, ‘that I had it in me to be fond of junketing,--oh, Geff, there’s one of my country words! luckily Gaston can’t hear it--of pleasure, I mean, and society. But the taste has died.’ Of what lingering, cruel death, who should know better than Geoffrey? ‘Ladies of my husband’s class have not called upon me. I have neither rank, talent, nor a million. Without these, Gaston says, no woman can make her way in the English world.’ Hot words were ready to rush from Geoffrey’s lips, but he kept them back. To remain on equal terms with husband and wife in this strange triangular friendship did sorely tax his powers of self-repression at times.