‘How such a girl as Miss Travers could choose the higher life, instead of marrying—some man like Lord Rex Basire, say, or Mr. Oscar Jones!’
‘Those two are not the only types of man extant,’ observed Cassandra.
To this there succeeded a sufficiently pregnant silence. Marjorie broke it with effort. Her voice had become unsteady. Her sentences were disjointed.
‘We are to stay one night in London—I don’t know whether grandpapa told you about the plans? Next day we shall see whatever sights are visible through the November fog, and late in the afternoon I shall run down to Cambridge. It is high time I learned to knock about the world alone! If I work steadily when we come back to Guernsey, very likely I may go up to Girton as a bye-term man in January.’
‘Is this the future you wanted to talk about?’ Cassandra Tighe bent forward. She looked hard at the slim girlish figure, the delicately feminine face of Marjorie Bartrand. ‘You must learn to knock about the world alone! You will go up in January as a bye-term man! These prospects may be intoxicating. We require, I think, no assistance from the friendly half-light to discuss them in.’
The remark went home. Marjorie’s ill-fated love affair had long been an open secret between her and old Cassandra Tighe, and in a few minutes’ time half confidences were over, reserve had gone to the winds. Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s name, for the first time for months, was on the girl’s trembling lips.
‘I am not likely to be over forward again, Miss Tighe. But, strive as I will, the longing overcomes me to see Mr. Arbuthnot—before he marries some one else—to give him a last chance of explanation. The word—the one word—I wrote that miserable afternoon may never have reached him. When I heard Mrs. Arbuthnot was out,’ Marjorie made confession, ‘my courage went from me—I had hoped to leave my packet safe in Dinah’s hands—and I just gave it, without a message, to the servant who answered my ring. Then I drove away—fast, for fear Geoffrey should meet me and see my face.’
‘The Arbuthnot people were a singular trio.’ Cassandra made the remark with an irrelevant neutrality savouring of the serpent’s wisdom. ‘The best looking of the men, not your tutor, Marjorie, is doing good things, it seems, as an artist. Colonel de Gourmet has a correspondent in Florence, where the Gaston Arbuthnots live, and the accounts of them are favourable. You know, of course, that there is a Miss Arbuthnot?’
‘Yes, I have heard the news. It is good to think that Dinah must be a happier woman now.’
‘We shall not see such a face again on our shores. Do you remember my mistake about her, Marjorie—the lecture I made you read your tutor on his frivolity?’