‘The martyrdom would not last long,’ urged Dinah, misjudging his intention. ‘To any one so fond of the sea as you, Geff, twelve or fifteen hours on board a steamer are not much. We are to leave early in the morning and be back in Guernsey the following night. If you know what a kindness you would be doing me!’
‘I mean to go,’ said Geff Arbuthnot shortly.
Twelve hours! He felt, just then, that he would pass twelve weeks, or months, on a steamer, if by so doing he could lighten one ounce of Dinah’s burthens to her!
‘And Gaston’s conscience will be at rest,’ she exclaimed. ‘The truth is, you see, Gaston was not well pleased at my accepting at all. He bade me ask you, Geoffrey, to look after me.’
To a more sophisticated mind than Geff’s it might have occurred that the most fitting man to look after Gaston Arbuthnot’s wife would be—Gaston Arbuthnot himself.
CHAPTER XXI ‘IS MY VIRGIL PASSABLE?’
I have written that, in a softened and remorseful moment Marjorie Bartrand’s heart owned Geoffrey for its master.
In a character like Marjorie’s, softened and remorseful moods are apt, however, to be intermittent. On the evening of Saturday her pride had melted, ay, to such a point that, holding her tutor’s ‘love-letter’ between her hands, she went into a storm of penitent tears—she, Marjorie Bartrand, whose boast had been that there was one woman in Her British Majesty’s domain who would shed tears for no man while she lived!