There was a ring of sharpness in Linda Thorne’s tone.
‘Ah—what! The moment,’ said Gaston, ‘when gleams of a scarlet cloak first flashed upon one along the sand-dunes seems, to my own consciousness, about the most serious of them.’
‘You are singularly insincere, Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot!’
‘I cannot agree with you, Mrs. Thorne. My worst enemies, on the contrary, have the grace to credit me with a sort of brutal frankness.’
‘And, supposing no scarlet cloak had appeared? You would willingly have been left, a second Robinson Crusoe, on the desert shores of Luc?’
‘The cases are not parallel. Robinson Crusoe had only the society of his man Friday.’
‘And there were no beaux yeux to weep for him! So many years,’ observed Linda, ‘stand between me and the literature of my childhood that I am uncertain about details. But I don’t think one ever heard of a Mrs. Crusoe!’
Gaston knew that he was being laughed at. He kept his temper charmingly.
‘And there is, very decidedly, a Mrs. Arbuthnot. When I think of Dinah, I cannot call Miss Tighe’s advent a misadventure. Poor Dinah has a child’s quick capacity for unhappiness. Her imagination would have conjured up a dozen possible horrors, by sea and land, if I had not returned to her.’
‘That is all so very, very pretty, is it not?’ Linda stooped, as if watching the rush of the sea; Gaston Arbuthnot could not catch the expression of her face. ‘We professional old travellers are toughened and sun-baked out of all rose-water nervousness. Robbie has told you—whom does he not tell?—the story of my being lost, actually lost, in the Nilgiris? If I were to be mislaid for a fortnight, I really don’t believe the Doctor would suffer a moment’s uneasiness.’