‘I do not understand you,’ interrupted Dinah, with ill-judged warmth. ‘The party was planned before any one in Guernsey knew of my existence. I was asked accidentally—because I could be of use. Four or five girls had promised these young officers to come, and they wanted a married woman as a chaperon. This was what Lord Rex Basire said when he invited me on Monday.’
‘And you believed him? You accepted out of pure kindness to faire tapisserie! Mrs. Arbuthnot, you are too amiable.’
By this time Dinah Arbuthnot’s face blazed from brow to chin. Her conscience, over-sensitive in the lightest matter, smote her sore. Was not a selfish longing for widened experience—nay, was not a certain distrust of Gaston, a contemptible sense of triumph over Linda—at the bottom of her acquiescence?
‘What unusually correct taste Dame Nature displays in her colouring this evening.’ Mrs. Thorne gazed with decent vacuity at the sky, and away from Dinah’s face. ‘Soft primrose, fading into pearly-green, with just those few vivid touches of deep crimson. It suggests thoughts for a ball dress. And still, beautiful though the effect is, I would rather not see that sort of shimmer on the water. If we come in for fog-banks somewhere about the Race of Alderney, it will matter little whether the picnic originated for the chaperons, or the chaperons for the picnic! How atrociously hungry this sort of thing makes one! Surely dinner-time must be drawing nigh.’
CHAPTER XXVII GROWING OLD GRACEFULLY
‘In two words, you have amused yourself, my dear.’ Under cover of the friendly twilight, Gaston Arbuthnot pressed his wife’s hand as it rested, a little shyly, on his arm. ‘A good sign for the future. You must enter into the world more, Dinah. You must cultivate this faculty for being amused; I desire nothing better.’
Though fog-banks and disaster might lie in ambush about the Race of Alderney, nothing could be tranquiller than the fair summer evening here, on the coast of France.
After an excellent dinner, vraie cuisine Normande, served in the quaint, red-tiled salle of the Hôtel Chateaubriand, the collected yachting party were now progressing along the pleasant sweep of road that leads to Luc. Luc alone, among this group of villages, has a jetty, and off Luc the Princess lay moored. Daylight’s last flicker was dying from the sky. Already deep fissures of shade intersected the white sand dunes bordering the shore. The sea lay motionless, a vague iridescence far away, northward, the only foreboding of coming change. Cassandra Tighe, a bold spot of colour in the gloaming, had exchanged her dredging net for some amphibious structure of green gauze and whalebone. She flitted hither and thither among the bushes that skirted the path, moth-hunting. The younger members of the expedition, in groups of two, loitered slowly along their way, for it was an hour when girlish faces look their fairest, when men’s voices are apt to soften, involuntarily!