The remark was made with Geff’s usual seriousness. But Marjorie, reading between the lines, discerned some obvious joke therein. She laughed until the high-banked road along which they walked re-echoed to her fresh voice. Then starting at a brisk run, she took flight along a foot-track which, diverging from the chaussée, led through a couple of breast-high cornfields, across a corner of the common land, to Tintajeux.
Untaught daughter of nature though she was, Marjorie knew that every moment brought the supreme one nearer in which Geoffrey Arbuthnot must speak to her of love. Although the conclusion was foregone, although her whole girlish fancy was won, she strove, with such might as she possessed, to stave that moment off. For she knew that she was a traitress to her cause, an apostate from the man-despising creed in which, recollecting the sins of Major Tredennis, she had gloried.
Fast as her limbs would bear her the girl sped on, Geff Arbuthnot, with swinging, slow run, nicely adjusted to her pace, following half a dozen yards behind. ‘Renegade!’ every bush along the familiar path cried aloud to her. ‘Renegade,’ whispered the stream trickling down between rushy banks, through beds of thick forget-me-nots, to the shore. The cornfields were soon passed. They reached the breezy bit of moor above the Hüets. The ravine where the water-lanes met lay in purple shadow: all around was warm and joyous sunshine. A scent of fern and wild thyme filled the air. Far away the tide curled round the dark base of the Gros Nez range. The choughs and daws were flying across the face of the cliffs. The gulls poised and swooped, flashes of intense white against the background of green sea.
For very want of breath Marjorie presently stopped short. Geff was at her side in a couple of seconds. The young man caught her in his arms.
‘Mr. Arbuthnot.... Sir!’
‘I thought it my duty to steady you.’ He liberated her, partially, and with reluctance. ‘Your pace, Miss Bartrand, is killing. Do the Guernsey Sixties ever play hare and hounds? You would make a really respectable hare, I can tell you.’
‘I hope not.’ With a little air of ill-maintained stiffness Marjorie contrived to put a few more inches between Geoffrey and herself. ‘Who would wish to be anything really respectable, until one gets to the age of the Seigneur, at least?’
‘We shall both of us be too stiff for hare and hounds by that time.’
Perhaps this was the first hour of his life when Geoffrey Arbuthnot talked nonsense with a child’s sense of enjoyment, a child’s immunity from care. Hard facts, hard work, had made up the sum of his existence hitherto. His staunchest friends complained that he was just a little too grimly lord of himself. In his undergraduate days the men of his year, despite their recognition of his muscular and sterling qualities, had a suspicion that there lurked a skeleton in some hidden closet of Arbuthnot of John’s, a memory, or a dread which rendered the easy philosophy of youth impossible to him.