‘Without consulting the Seigneur! Child—you did this thing? You gave your name, unknown to your grandfather, in the public newspaper?’
‘I gave my name in the public newspaper, ma’am, and this afternoon I got an answer to my advertisement. Wait one second and you shall hear it.’
Marjorie drew a note from the breast of her frock, and with an air half of mystery, half of triumph, began to read aloud:—
‘“Miller’s Hotel, Tuesday, June 14th.
‘“Geoffrey Arbuthnot, B.A., Cantab., is willing to read classics and mathematics with Miss Bartrand. Terms, five shillings an hour. Geoffrey Arbuthnot will call at Tintajeux Manoir, on approval, between the hours of seven and eight this evening.”’
‘Arbuthnot? Why, this is fatality.’ Cassandra discerned a special providence, an inchoate stroke of destiny in most things. ‘I was looking in at Miller’s Hotel last night. That reasonless creature, Mrs. Miller, has one of her throats again, and I did so want her to take some of my globules, but in vain. The ignorance of uneducated people——’
‘And you saw my coach of the future,’ interrupted Marjorie, knowing that when Miss Tighe got into such engrossing interests as throats and globules, she must be brought back to her subject with a run.
‘Yes, I saw Mr. Arbuthnot. A rough diamond, my dear, to speak truth.’
‘That is so much in his favour,’ said Marjorie, peeling, shred from shred, the petals of a carnation that she held between her fingers. ‘I want to do my work for Girton steadily, unvexed by the sight or thought of that most irritating of God’s creatures—a beauty-man.’
Cassandra looked hard at the girl, remembering days, perhaps, when a beauty-man, in the fullest sense of the contemptuous epithet, had scathed rather than softened Marjorie Bartrand’s heart.
‘Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot, on the score of ugliness, will meet your wishes, my dear. A rough-hewn Scotchman of the Carlyle stamp. A man who looks as though he ought to do big things in the world. A man with a scar—got, I am told, in a Quixotic pavement fight—traversing his forehead.’