‘Dinah.’
‘I don’t know what to think of your tone. Why have you never said a word, never looked at me during all these hours? Are you offended?’
‘On the contrary,’ retorted Gaston. They were now out of sight, out of earshot of everybody. As he spoke, Arbuthnot withdrew his hand from his wife’s arm. ‘I am thoroughly your debtor. It was the sense of my indebtedness that made me bring you here. I wished to thank you without an audience, quietly.’
‘To thank me,’ stammered Dinah, in a sort of breathless way. ‘For—for——’ she broke off, reddening violently.
Gaston watched her. ‘For your solicitude, your kindly tact! That idea of despatching the old lady in the scarlet cloak to chaperon me was boldly original, a fine intuition of wifely vigilance——’
‘Gaston! I never——’
‘Yet scarcely the sort of vigilance that passes current in a commonplace and scoffing world. If you had the smallest spark of humour, Dinah—that missing sense! that one little flaw in your character!—you would see things as the commonplace scoffing world sees them.’
‘Should I?’
‘You would divine that, under no possible circumstances—really it would be well to remember this for the rest of our mortal lives—under no circumstances can I require an old lady, with or without a scarlet cloak, as my chaperon.’
A different woman to Dinah might here have turned the tables on Gaston Arbuthnot, have stoutly, truthfully disavowed responsibility as to Cassandra Tighe’s movements. Dinah was too transparently honest to defend herself as to the letter, knowing that she had been an accessory in the spirit.