‘O, I mean to marry, and turn out the sugar-broker some day,’ Geoffrey would reply in answer to these friendly speeches. Whereat Belle and Jessie would both blush, and look at each other, and then at the carpet. So bright a spot had that rustic tea-drinking made in the life of this infatuated gentleman, that the sunshine lingered after the event, and the mere memory of that one happy hour with Janet made life pleasant to him for a long time. Belle and Jessie noticed his high spirits, and each flattered herself with the idea that it was her society which gladdened him. And when they ‘talked him over,’ as they called it, at hair-brushing time, they in a manner congratulated each other upon his ‘niceness,’ just as if he were a kind of common property, and could marry both of them. He had still one tiresome trick, and that was a habit of rambling off for long solitary walks, in what the sisters considered a most unsociable spirit. ‘It’s about the only thing I can do on my own hook,’ this unpolite young man answered upon being remonstrated with. ‘If I go out shooting, you go too; if I go on the water, you pull a better stroke than I do; if I play bowls, you play bowls. You don’t smoke, but you are kind enough to come and sit with me in the smoking-room. So my only chance of doing a little thinking is a solitary walk. I suppose you don’t pedestrianise? Twenty miles a day might be too much for you.’ ‘O no, it wouldn’t,’ replied these thoroughbred damsels. ‘We’re going for a walking tour in the Isle of Wight next spring, if papa will take us. It seems absurd that two girls can’t walk alone, but I suppose it might be thought odd if we went by ourselves.’ Geoffrey uttered a faint groan, but spoke no word. He was counting the days that must elapse before he could pay a second visit to Foxley, without stretching the license Mrs. Bertram had accorded him. His lonely walks had taken him through Foxley more than once, and he had lingered a little on the village-green, and looked at the windows of old Sally’s cottage, and had longed in vain for but a glimpse of the face he loved. Fortune did not favour these surreptitious pilgrimages. Just as he began to think that the time had come when he might pay his second visit, and demand that promised cup of orange pekoe, Lucius Davoren’s letter reached him, and he learned that Janet’s husband was alive and in England. The news was a death-blow to his hopes. The man alive whose death he had vouched for! Alive, and with as good a life as his own perhaps! What would Janet think of him should she come to know this? What could she think, save that he had deliberately attempted to deceive her? His honest heart sank at the thought that she might deem him guilty of such baseness.