Her scene with Geoffrey had swept away all sense of the dual personality that troubled her before his coming. The strong-minded Minerva, criticising love and marriage with acerbity, had vanished, and in her place was a commonplace little girl sobbing her heart out, as Rosie Verschoyle, as Ada de Carteret might have done, for the sweetheart her own unruly tongue had estranged.
If Geoffrey would but come back, take her in his arms, kiss and forgive her! So, dumbly, cried Marjorie’s heart.
But supper-time came and went. The sun dipped under the fading sea line, the twilight waned, the yellow stars stole forth, one by one, from the gray: Geoffrey Arbuthnot returned not.
She had acted with family pride, perhaps from virtue, conceivably from jealousy, without doubt, as became a Bartrand. These cold consolations were all that the universe, just at present, seemed likely to offer.
CHAPTER XXXVIII TEMPTATION
When the Cherbourg boat reached Guernsey, twenty-four hours behind her time, no Dinah, with radiant expectant face, waited on the quay to bid Gaston Arbuthnot good-morning.
It was the first occasion since their marriage that she had in like manner failed. After ever so short a separation it was Dinah’s habit to go bravely to the fore on harbour side or platform with a welcome for the husband she loved. No Dinah was to be seen this morning. And Gaston Arbuthnot’s spirit sat more lightly on its throne by reason of her absence.
He was honestly glad to return. A day and a night’s detention on a rock, with a thick sea-fog, and without one’s dressing-case, was a test, of sentiment and of friendship alike, which Gaston had felt to be beyond his strength. But it was a relief to him that poor Dinah, effusive, reproachful—Dinah, half sunshine, half tears—should not be on the pier to enact a little scene of domestic interest beneath the sharp, uncomprehending eyes of Linda Thorne.