‘I am a man,’ he answered, ‘to change upon the day you bid me do so. If, at some future time, you think less vile things of me——’
‘Mr. Arbuthnot!’
‘Well, or without that. If it should be your whim, in some idle hour, to remember my existence—dare I say, to send me a flower you have worn, a bit of ribbon, a sheet of paper with a single relenting word written on it—you will have only to address your envelope to St. John’s, Cambridge.’
‘And now, for the remainder of this summer?’ asked Marjorie, drear visions rising before her of a silent schoolroom, of work laboured through without the poignant desire of Geoffrey’s praise. ‘Is it possible that you mean—that you have no other course than to leave Guernsey at once?’
Something in her manner made it seem that she referred their quarrel to him for final arbitration. But Geff Arbuthnot tried his utmost to congeal. His present temper indisposed him for compromise. He had been cut to the quick by that one scornful imputation, that one base utterance of Marjorie’s lips—‘The acres of Tintajeux, few though they be, are matters better worth caring for than Marjorie Bartrand, herself.’
He felt it impossible to forgive her.
‘I shall certainly not leave Guernsey without calling on the Seigneur—to be paid.’
Geoffrey was not superior to a feeling of pleasure in the repetition of these words. They were horribly cruel ones. It might well be, afterwards, that he remembered with remorse how the girl’s slender figure drooped, how her cheeks burned, how her hands fell listlessly upon her knee, one in the other’s palm.
‘And then—for the rest of the vacation, what are your plans?’ she repeated, presently.