‘You may fill it, full as time can hold. I thought as I watched you charming poor Jack out of knowledge of his pain that you had missed your vocation. You should be a nurse. Yours are the ideal face and voice and tread that we want in the hospitals. If you ever harbour thoughts of emancipation, or of a mission,’ said Geoffrey, ‘remember my hint.’
‘When Gaston has used the last line that can be modelled from my face, for instance?’
The smile was flickering with which Dinah hazarded the surmise.
‘When Gaston has got his last inspiration from your face! Unluckily for the hospitals, that day will not come quite yet. A woman with a mission should have no such vexatious encumbrance as a husband or a lover.’
For once, Geoffrey’s tone was cynical. He recalled his parting with Marjorie Bartrand over-night.
CHAPTER XL AT THE BUNGALOW
And all this time an offer of truce lay on the mantelshelf of Dinah’s parlour; an offer directed to himself in the handwriting whose Greek e’s, whose girlish assumption of scholarship, Geoffrey’s heart knew!
Can we wonder at the pagan notion that the gods must needs hold their sides for laughter when they gaze down on the ever-twisted plot of our little lives? Geoffrey and Dinah were within a hundred feet of Miller’s house. Five minutes more and Geff must have been lifted—this time into quite other than a Fool’s Paradise, when, abruptly, a new actor, jauntily floating in cobweb Indian silk, gleaming under a scarlet sunshade, with eight-buttoned gloves, with airs, with graces innumerable, made her entrance upon the scene.