So keen a sense of distinction was conveyed by the italicised words that Marjorie forebore from further questioning. An hour later, however, when they were parting for the night in the fresh, chintz-draped attic which was the guest-chamber of the house, she ventured on a last surmise.
‘As we passed a certain baize door at the turning of the stairs I smelt the smell of a pipe. Our bon locataire must live somewhere in that neighbourhood, Mademoiselle—our quiet gentleman, who is not an undergraduate, and who has the photograph of Tintajeux Manoir on his walls?’
But Pouchée was blankly uncommunicative. The gentleman went in and out by the other staircase. Marjorie would neither see nor hear him during her stay in Cambridge. As to the photograph—it would certainly return to its place in the salon to-morrow morning.
‘If you are afraid of University ghosts,’ added the Frenchwoman, as she bade her guest a final good-night, ‘you will do wisely to bolt your door. Sleep well, ma mie, and dream that we are making cowslip balls, as we used a dozen years ago, in the woods of Tintajeux.’
The first five days of her Cambridge visit were resolutely spent by Marjorie in sight-seeing. It was well for her, she said, to come under the external influences of the Alma Mater, watch the cheerful flow of undergraduate life, look at Newnham and Girton from without, before delivering her letters of introduction.... It was well for her, while she still stood uncommitted to the future, to run a last forlorn chance of meeting the man she loved!
Here was the truth, unrecognised, perhaps, as truth, even in Marjorie Bartrand’s moments of sternest self-questioning. Day after day, however, slipped vainly by. A dozen times in each twenty-four hours her heart would leap, her pulses throb as men of Geoffrey’s height or build went past her in the crowded streets. Geoffrey Arbuthnot appeared not. She fell to quarrelling with herself over her own folly. Geoffrey might be at the other side of the world—married—contented: in every case must have learnt long ago to live his life, to do his work without her. Happily, there were reprisals....
On the morning of the sixth day she determined to put her sweetheart away from her remembrance for ever.
‘I have come to the end of my sight-seeing.’ This she told the Pouchées at breakfast. ‘I have heard a University sermon and the services at King’s and Trinity. We have visited Trumpington churchyard and the Backs. I have seen Milton’s tree and Gray’s fire-escape, and—and the Girton girls playing tennis. When I have gone over your house, Madame Pouchée, when I know what kind of rooms reading gentlemen inhabit, my experience will be complete.’
The speech fell from her idly. Small curiosity in the affairs of others was never a sin to be reckoned among the Bartrand qualities.
But Mademoiselle Pouchée’s manner gave it purpose. Mademoiselle changed colour, fidgeted with her coffee-spoon, contradicted herself. ‘The rooms were the plainest rooms in Cambridge. No knowing at what time our gentleman went out or might return. For herself, she seldom entered his part of the house, and——’