Dinah, who knew him well, Gaston, who knew him better, never saw the look on Geff Arbuthnot’s strong face which lit it in the red freshness of this Guernsey morning.
‘How shamefully we lose the best hours of the day!’ Marjorie’s hand rested, as she spoke, on a wicket-gate, overgrown by sweetbriar, which led into the Manoir gardens. ‘Did you ever smell cherry-pie so sweet before?’ Heliotrope was a passion with old Andros Bartrand. Rows of the odorous purple bloom, profusely flourishing in this generous climate, garnished the borders, even, of his kitchen garden. ‘I, for one, mean to mend my ways. I shall get up with the sun from this day forth.’
‘Alter my hours, then. We could read together, out of doors, at sunrise, just as well as in the schoolroom at eleven.’
‘Do you think we should do much serious work, Mr. Arbuthnot?’
Marjorie asked the question with assurance, then coloured up to the roots of her hair.
‘Not unless breakfast were part of the programme,’ said Geoffrey, with discernment. ‘At this moment,’ he added, ‘I am reminded of my schoolboy days in the City. I recall, forcibly, the starvation pangs that used to unman us on dreary winter mornings over the pages of our Latin Grammar and Greek Delectus.’
It was not a sentimental speech. Even when treading the primrose path, nineteenth century young people are rarely indifferent, like the heroic lovers of an older school, to their meals. And these young people had really eaten nothing since yesterday’s dinner in Langrune. Confessing that she too was famished, Marjorie proposed an instant sack of the Tintajeux dairy and larder. There was a broken pane in one of the dairy casements through which, luck befriending them, a bolt might be drawn. From the dairy it would be only a step to the larder, and then, having secured their booty, they could go forth and eat their breakfast together in Arcadia.
‘It is a bigger adventure, I can tell you, Mr. Arbuthnot, than any which befel us on board the Princess. Grandpapa and Sylvestre keep loaded carbines, and are quite careless as to time and place in the matter of firing their weapons off.’
‘I am not fond of carbines—still, hunger overcomes my natural cowardice,’ said Geoffrey. ‘I would brave Sylvestre—I would brave the Seigneur himself for a bowl of milk.’
The dairy, almost hidden from view by thickly-planted alders, lay at the northern end of the Manoir, immediately under a window of the old Seigneur’s study.