Marjorie moved away into the nearest window. She looked out, athwart garden, orchard, moor, towards the Atlantic, gray, sullen, as though the season had gone back from June to December. A sense of deeply wounded pride, of cruel, inexplicable disappointment mingled in the girl’s heart. ‘I ought to have done the right thing,’ so she communed with herself. ‘I ought to have done it at once. I have just drifted into meanness. As though it could matter to us Bartrands if every woman in the island declined to call on Mrs. Arbuthnot. It was you, Miss Tighe,’ she turned round incisively on Cassandra, ‘who preached to me the gospel of Mammon.’ ‘And one hears such nice things said of her, poor dear. The faults are so obviously the husband’s. Really, if I could have known all one knows now, my wisest advice would have been--keep clear of them both! In these prickly affairs, in anything connected with a _mésalliance_, you are pretty sure to get your hand stung, whichever way you grasp your nettle.’ ‘Too late in the day for pensive regrets, Miss Tighe. I have not kept clear of Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot.’ ‘The more the pity. As matters stand, Marjorie, I know that your conduct will be full of the sweetest tact. We have a few old-fashioned rules,’ said good, well-meaning Cassandra, ‘to guide us in our perplexities. The first is, to do unto others as we would they should do unto us.’ ‘To-day is not Sunday.’ Marjorie’s foot tapped a quick little tune on the polished floor. ‘Please don’t let us have Sunday talk.’ ‘How should we feel if we were Mrs. Arbuthnot? If you were Mrs. Arbuthnot, how would you wish Marjorie Bartrand should do unto you?’ Cassandra’s tone was plaintively sentimental, infalliblest tone of all to stir up mischief, never far from the surface, in Marjorie Bartrand’s heart. ‘How should I feel if I were Mrs. Arbuthnot? Wish that I had my precious liberty back, of course, and envy every girl I met hers--the natural feelings, one would hope, of all well-conducted, sensible married women. Ah,’ ejaculated Marjorie, folding her lithe arms, and with darkness like that of a swiftly-gathered thunder-cloud on her Southern face, ‘and to hear people talk as though such things as roaming husbands and weeping wives were _necessities_, as though the doom of the serpent was laid upon every son and daughter of Adam. _A Dieu ne plaise_ that it should be so! There is one girl,’ striking her breast emphatically, ‘in Her British Majesty’s dominions who will shed tears for no man while she lives!’ ‘We will hope so, Marjorie,’ said Cassandra, as she put on her driving gloves. ‘A good many of us have held the same opinions at seventeen, and yet had occasion to modify them later on.’ CHAPTER X ‘THEY SAY----’