Was she really, if one watched her dispassionately, so beautiful?
Dinah set up her frame, and, leaning over it, began, or went through the semblance of beginning, to count her stitches. In doing so the line of down-bent golden head, the sweep of lash on the pink cheek, the outline of throat and shoulder, were given with full unconscious effect to Lord Rex. And the young man’s heresy left him. Whatever his other scepticisms, he felt, while he lived he could never doubt more on one subject, the flawlessness of Dinah Arbuthnot’s beauty.
‘Please let me help you in your dreary arithmetic, Mrs. Arbuthnot. Lend me a needle, at least, and give me a trial. I have only one hand to use, but I have been shown, often, how worsted-work stitches are counted.’ And, indeed, Rex Basire had had a pretty wide training in most unprofitable pursuits. ‘Each little painted square of the pattern goes for two threads, does it not?’
‘I am sure I did not know gentlemen understood about cross-stitch!’ And Dinah reluctantly surrendered her canvas to his outstretched hand. ‘Your lordship,’ she added, ‘will never make out the different shades of blue. This forget-me-not border is the most heart-breaking pattern I have worked.’
Your lordship—your lordship! Gaston’s face assumed an unwonted liveliness of colour as his wife’s voice reached him. Would Dinah never leave off talking as the young ladies talk behind the counters in glove shops, he asked himself? Would she never learn the common everyday titles by which men and women address each other in the world?
The clay was no longer plastic under Mr. Arbuthnot’s touch. He moved without sound to the window. He took a discerning glance at the two people seated beside the table—Lord Rex with masculine awkward fingers solemnly parcelling out canvas forget-me-nots, as though his commission depended on his accuracy; Dinah, a look of shy amusement on her face, demurely watching him.
Gaston Arbuthnot took one glance. Then he put aside his tools, wrapped a wet cloth hastily around ‘Dodo’s Despair,’ and with a manner not devoid of a certain impatience, prepared to quit his studio. Could it be—the question presented itself unbidden—that a shadow of coming distrust had fallen on him? The thought was absurd. He, Gaston Arbuthnot, distrustful of the gentle, home-staying girl, whose devotion to himself had at times—poor Dinah—amounted to something worse than a fault, an inconvenience! That to-morrow’s sun should rise in the east was not a surer fact than that his wife’s Griselda-like fidelity should endure to the end.
And still, in the inmost conscience of him, Gaston Arbuthnot was uncomfortable.
He had spent nearly four years of absolute trust—four golden years of youth, of love, with the sweetest companion that ever blest the lot of erring man. In this moment he realised the sensation of the first crumpled rose-leaf. Commonly jealous he could not be. His temperament, the circumstances of his lot, forbade ignoble feeling. He knew that for a man like Rex Basire toleration must be the kindliest sentiment that Dinah, with difficulty, could bring herself to entertain.
It was not jealousy, not distrust; it was simply the reversal of all past experience that disconcerted Gaston’s mind. It was the whole abnormal picture—the diverted look on Dinah’s face, her embroidery needle and canvas—hers—between Rex Basire’s fingers, that was so blankly unwelcome in his sight.