‘Will you hear me out to the end?’ There was a ring of command rather than of pleading in Geoffrey’s tone. ‘Four years ago it was my fate, I can never say my misfortune, to come across a girl whom it was madness for me to love. I lost. I suffered. But many a man has met with a like overthrow, and got firmly to his feet in time. I am very firm on my feet,’ said Geff Arbuthnot. ‘I have grown young again in knowing you. If you had chosen to become my wife, I could have loved you well. Yes, I do love you—too well! Now, when it seems we are like bidding good-bye for ever.’
And Geoffrey rested his hands for an instant upon the girl’s graceful down-bent head.
‘And the dream is over—over.’ She repeated the words huskily, not so much thinking of Geff as seeking to bring home to herself the extremity of her own pain. ‘We are to be nothing to each other from this hour forth, not even friends.’
Geoffrey Arbuthnot walked a few steps away. The movement was prompted by a definite and conscious weakness. This saying good-bye for ever was no easy thing, he found, so long as his hand rested upon the silken hair, so long as the slender figure palpitated close to him, the heliotrope sent its odour to his brain from Marjorie’s breast.
‘The dream is over, because you discovered it to be a dream. You must acknowledge, Miss Bartrand, that you have taken the matter wholly out of my keeping.’
‘We might see each other, as friends,’ she stammered—true to a time-worn instinct of her sex, offering a stone for bread, friendship to the man she loved, and who loved her. ‘Surely our work need not be dropped because of this I As long as you stay in the island you will come out to read with me at Tintajeux?’
‘I shall return to Tintajeux, once more, after to-night,’ was Geff Arbuthnot’s answer. ‘I shall return to shake hands with the Seigneur, and to be paid my money. Good-bye for ever are hard words to speak,’ he went on. ‘But we shall not make the hardness easier by trying to shirk them. We have, virtually, said good-bye already.’
‘And we are never to be nearer reconciliation than this? You are not a man to change?’
There came a furtive play of feeling upon her mouth. Deep in her heart lurked a formless hope that Geoffrey was not in earnest, that at a smile, a touch of hers, he must yield, if she so willed it.