The corps de ballet was already setting towards the lawn. Cassandra Tighe had taken her place at the piano beside an open window. Geoffrey Arbuthnot and Marjorie, with youth, with love, with the heaviness of parting at their hearts, were alone. But their good chance was gone. The thread had snapped which bound together poor Marjorie’s monosyllables. Two minutes later she would be treading a waltz measure, the arm of Mr. Oscar Jones round her waist. And Geff (the conqueror, to whom all, in whitest, girlish faith, had been conceded) felt his blood rebel. He took the reprisals of his nobler sex, offered prompt, italicised repetition of the crushing word, apology.
‘You have accepted mine, have you not, Miss Bartrand?’ He held his hand out, steadily, for a last good-bye.
‘I accept the blame you choose to force on me,’ said Marjorie, turning aside her face.
Cold, fettered, was the speech of both. Still, in this interval there was an encounter of pulses. Their hands had met; the farewell pressure was a lingering one. Propinquity—unspiritual god of youthful lovers—might, even at this supreme moment, have set things straight, had not old Andros Bartrand passed by, looked at them, smiled.
Marjorie moved away with a start. She felt as much divided from her sweetheart as though the Channel already rolled between them.
‘What is this I hear about your leaving us, Arbuthnot? The little witch has been plaguing you, I suspect, with her false quantities. My dear sir, not one in a thousand of the sex has an ear. Music is an art in which they have had more opportunities than we, and there has never been even a third-rate female composer. You are going to England next week? To-morrow! Nay, if it is to be to-morrow we must have business talk together. Come with me, Arbuthnot, to the library.’
The situation was a crucial one for Marjorie Bartrand. Scarcely had Geoffrey gone away with the Seigneur—her heart told her, ‘to be paid’—before a dapper figure tripped, alertly, across the rooms. The well satisfied voice of little Oscar Jones reminded her that the first waltz was beginning, that they were engaged to dance it together. Her cheeks tingled with the sense of her humiliation and of her helplessness.
Oscar was in high spirits. ‘Coach gone, I suppose? Dancing not much in Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s line. Confess now, Miss Bartrand’—by this time they had reached the dancers on the lawn, Mr. Jones’s arm encircled the girl’s lithe slip of a waist—‘confess, in your heart, that you rate enjoyment higher than you do Euclid and Plato?’
‘I do not understand your question. I cannot deal in generalities.’