‘Take them to him, of course,’ Dinah exclaimed. ‘Surely, Geff, you might have done that, without asking.’
‘And do you suppose Jack would not value such gifts more if they came from a woman’s hand, the delicate white hand whose uses you despise! To-day is Friday. On Friday afternoon the patients’ friends are admitted to see them. But Jack’s friends are far away in Devonshire. You will be his only visitor if you consent to come.’
Dinah rose, acquiescently, rather than with any initiative warmth. She had a moment’s hesitation. Gaston held such contradictory opinions, at times.... No knowing if Gaston would approve of her putting herself forward. There was the Archdeaconess ... there were the island clergy? Then, encountering a look that had a command in it from Geoffrey’s eyes, she moved lingeringly towards the adjoining room.
‘If I dressed to please myself, you need not wait two minutes, Geff. But the powers that be,’ the little malice flashed from her unawares, ‘are sensitive—as to millinery! I could not run the terrible risk of meeting Mrs. Thorne and Gaston in my morning gown.’
CHAPTER XXXIX THAT LITTLE DIVINITY
The project roused her, at least, into physical brightness. As she walked at Geoffrey’s side towards the hospital, the basket of strawberries hanging from her arm, her hands filled with roses, a stranger, meeting them, would have taken Dinah Arbuthnot for some April cheeked girl, ignorant of passion as of disappointment; a girl needing no apologist! She wore, on this fateful afternoon, a dove-coloured Quaker gown, a Gainsborough hat tied beneath her chin by black velvet strings; item, a large plain cambric tippet, with cambric half sleeves reaching to the elbows. It was the latest costume invented by her husband in an idle moment. And Geoffrey had lost exactly half an hour while she put it on.
But what man would grudge a lost half-hour after one glance at that for which he had waited!
The road from Miller’s Hotel to the hospital led through Petersport High Street, and close to the north entrance of Colonel de Gourmet’s garden. At the moment when Dinah and Geff walked along, it chanced that the Colonel, himself, reclined under the shaded verandah of his drawing-room,—the Colonel, smoking his third cheroot, and offering unsentimental criticisms on the dress and looks of such feminine passers-by as came within range of a pair of languidly held opera-glasses.