‘This day when I have asked you, wisely or unwisely, to be my wife?’
‘If your conscience were clear you could not trifle with me like this. You would say No, or Yes.’
And, thus urged, Geoffrey Arbuthnot said ‘Yes’—with unmitigated frankness, without a hint either at penitence or remorse. Long ago, in his undergraduate days—thus the confession ran—he had fallen in love ... possibly as men do not fall in love twice during their lives! He was rough, plain, a student as Marjorie saw him now, no suitor to win a young girl’s fancy. And so——
‘And so,’ broke in Marjorie with trembling interest, ‘she was false to you?’
‘She was neither false nor true,’ he answered; ‘I had no place at all in her heart. My own best friend’—and here Geff’s voice sank, each word of his avowal seemed wrung from him with pain—‘became, unconsciously, my rival.’
‘Your best friend,’ stammered Marjorie, upon whom a first flicker of light was beginning to dawn.
‘Best, then, and I hope for ever—just as she whom he married will, I know, be my ideal of all sweet and womanly qualities till I die. Although I lost her,’ exclaimed Geff Arbuthnot, ‘I owe her everything! It is using a commonplace to say that I would at any hour start to the other side of the world, if by so starting I could confer on her the smallest service. But it is the truth.’
He was a man, ordinarily, of demeanour so reticent, of emotions so controlled, that this little outburst struck on Marjorie Bartrand with double force. Alas! there could not be room for another instant’s doubt. She recalled the morning when she had lectured her tutor on his frivolity, she remembered his embarrassment when she spoke of Dinah as his wife—his absence of mind, his pallor. The story of his past life was laid open, a clear page, for her to read. The confession of her engagement to Major Tredennis had met with an over-full equivalent.
‘At last, then,’ she murmured, ‘I have got to the truth of things. It might have been juster if I had not been deceived so long.’