‘You believe that the letter came from Marjorie Bartrand?’
The question fell from her lips almost unconsciously.
‘One suspects the Greek “e’s,” and see—here, in this corner is the Bartrand crest, an eagle with a bad-tempered beak and upheld claw. Take back your own, wife, your cherished vendetta. I will have none of it.’
‘And you think she cared, really, for poor Geff?’
‘Marjorie was seventeen years old. The season of the year was June. They bent their heads together over the same schoolroom table. Even I—I, who have been so long out of the running, saw whither things tended as early as the rose-show. Geff, no doubt, after a Platonic mode, admired the budding Girton girl—a girl,’ said Gaston, narrow-mindedly, ‘far too pretty for her calling! There came a breeze between them,—Geoffrey hinted as much to me the night before he left Guernsey,—a threatening of storm which, if a certain letter had not been kidnapped, might have cost him his life, I mean his liberty, there and then.’
By this time the blood had gone from Dinah’s cheeks. ‘And all this was brought about through me, through my small, self-engrossed jealousy. Oh, Gaston, how sinful I was, how guilty I am still! But for me, Geoffrey might long ago have come to happiness. He was our best friend always, and I betrayed him. I am the veriest wretch on earth.’
Tears of repentance rushed to Dinah’s eyes.
‘You do not mention a slight reparation you owe to Linda Thorne,’ observed Gaston, with his shrewd smile. ‘You forget that something may be due also to me, even me, a husband.’
‘I was ill, body and mind, that miserable day. I had scarce had an hour’s sleep since I came back from Langrune without you. A flimsy excuse,’ poor Dinah faltered, ‘and yet the only one I have to offer.’
‘It is the excuse in vogue. The big social scientists put just the same plea forward for the criminal classes. Crime is an illness. A man may run a knife into another simply because his digestion, reacting on the nerve centres, happened to be out of order. Probably, like you, my dear, the poor fellow had been suffering from insomnia! Such excuses,’ added Gaston, ‘are comforting enough for the man with the knife, but scarcely so consolatory to him stabbed.’