‘Poor Sophie le Patourel! You have outgrown her, at last, as you outgrew all your previous dozen or more governesses.’
‘I don’t know about “outgrown.” Grandpapa ridiculed our attempting Greek, from the first. You know the cruel way we Bartrands have of ridiculing under cover of a compliment! Well, one day last week, Mademoiselle le Patourel was reading the text of Plato aloud, not very flowingly, poor good soul——’
‘Sophie le Patourel had better have kept to the millinery! Her mother made up a cap like no woman in this island.’
‘And looking round she saw the Seigneur, outside the window, with a wicked smile about that handsome old mouth of his as he listened. Grandpapa made her the prettiest speech in the world about her quantities, her fine classic tastes, and her pupil. And Mademoiselle le Patourel never gave me another lesson.’
‘So now your scheme is to prepare for Girton by yourself. Ambitious, on my word!’
‘My scheme,’ said Marjorie, lowering her voice and glancing over her shoulder to make sure her terrible grandfather, Andros Bartrand, was not within earshot—‘my scheme is to have a real University coach of my own. A Cambridge B.A. at the present time residing in Guernsey.’
Cassandra Tighe started up from her seat.
She was a spare, tall, conspicuous spinster, with a face all features, a figure all angles, a manner all energy. Her hair was bleached, as much by exposure to weather as by actual age. Her complexion was that of a frosted apple. Her dress cost her fifteen pounds a year!
Living alone with one woman-servant in a small Guernsey cottage, it may be affirmed that Miss Tighe made as much of her life as any gentlewoman of modest income, and more than sixty summers, in the British dominions. Her intellectual resources were many. She was a thorough, an inborn naturalist. She played the harp, and with no dilettante touch, but as ladies early in the Victorian reign were wont to play that instrument. She drew. On stormy evenings, when she knew her voice could not penetrate the cottage window shutters, Cassandra confessed that she sang—such songs as ‘I see them on their winding way,’ ‘The Captive Knight,’ or ‘Zuleika.’