‘I will tell you, on one condition. What was your wish when you curtsied under the cedars to the new moon?’
‘My wish?’ turning farther and farther away from him. ‘Why, folly unrepeatable—the sort of nonsense my nurses taught me to say when I was little. Your memory is inconveniently good.’
‘Accurate to the smallest detail! How clearly one can see the meeting of those four water-lanes, and the flowers you gave me, as I know now, alas! for Mrs. Arbuthnot, and the ribbon you tied them with—the ribbon,’ said Geff coolly, ‘which you will some day send me back for a book-marker! Yes, the fairest summer evening of my life was the one when I first saw Tintajeux Manoir—and you.’
And he believed his own words. Sure sign that the heart within him was sound—healthiest life at its core. Guessing at the confessions of that ingenuous maidenly face as Marjorie, half blushes, half wilfulness, persistently gave him her profile, Geoffrey Arbuthnot had clean forgotten Lesser Cheriton, ay, and a drama played out there in which he took a not unimportant part.
‘I think this Norman evening is to the full as fair,’ said Marjorie. ‘There are bigger sweeps of outline, there is more quality in the air than falls to our lot in the Channel Islands.’
Then, again, there came a pause, broken softly by the occasional hum of an insect on the wing, by the swaying of stalks, the whispers of the ripe and restless grain, by the chirp of the hedge crickets, by the solitary treble of a lark lost somewhere, pouring its heart out in the sea-blue vault above.
Marjorie could not be silent long.
‘To begin at the beginning, what did you think of me when you got my first note—the two lines I sent in answer to yours? Nothing very good, or you would not be so reluctant to tell it.’
‘I thought,’ said Geff, ‘that you required my services as a coach, that there was a little affectation about your Greek “e’s,” and that your name was Marjorie D. Bartrand.’