‘Of that you may be assured. If two women are to conspire together in league against him, I say “poor Geff” with still more marked emphasis.’
And rising, Gaston moved in the direction of the door. In these later days, in the confidence of established love, Dinah had thought it no grievance that her husband should join the Florentine Artists’ Club, or spend a portion of every evening in other society than hers.
‘Like all true women you are a remorseless match-maker,’ he told her. ‘Unless the flame between these two victims is clean burnt out, you will contrive by your letter to re-kindle it.’
‘I wish I were a better scribe—that I could put my heart between the lines! Oh, I must begin at once. Baby shall be left—for the first time—with old Giacintha, and I will run round to the Piazza, and post the letter myself.’
‘Five years hence, I hope Geoffrey will bless you for having written it. There was a flash of temper not to be forgotten in Marjorie Bartrand’s handsome eyes.’
‘And if there was! If a woman has a temper, even a jealous one, is it impossible for her husband’s life to be happy?’
Dinah had followed Gaston to the door. She held up her face—the loveliest face in Florence, said the artists who worked therein—for his kiss.
‘All men are not philosophers,’ Gaston Arbuthnot made reply. ‘I have learnt—tolerably dear the lesson cost me—not only to exist in a stormy atmosphere, but to flourish there.’
And this is what Dinah wrote, not troubling herself over possible faults of Syntax, not making a fair copy in the slanting pointed handwriting to which, after much labour, she had tediously attained. This is what Dinah wrote, straight out from her heart—
‘Florence, November 15.
‘My dear Miss Bartrand,
‘I have just found, with shame and remorse, that I did you grievous wrong, last July twelvemonth. You were the kindest friend, save Geff, that ever I met, and I repaid you, little meaning it, with treachery. Perhaps when you see the enclosed you will guess what bitter confession I have got to make.
‘Dear Miss Bartrand—I found your envelope on the mantelpiece of our parlour at Miller’s Hotel, and I committed the meanest action of my life. I broke it open—and because I was blind with selfish trouble, and thought of my own suffering before all things, I kept the letter. I have had it in my possession till this hour.
‘It would be poor excuse to say I mistook the person it was meant for, as well as the hand that wrote it. It would be cowardice to say my heart was too hot, too miserable to reason. I sinned, and if my sin has stood between my best friends and happiness, my punishment will last me my life.
‘Unless I make too bold, may I hope, some future time, you will let Geoffrey read what I now write? Ask him to think of July the 1st, the day I went with him to Guernsey hospital. It was on that day, a quarter of an hour after Geoffrey left me, at the sight of some one he will remember, that I found your letter.
‘Dear Miss Bartrand, I am the penitent and humble well-wisher of your happiness,
‘Dinah.’