‘Our gentleman robbed himself. When I told him the morning after your arrival that you had asked for it, he took the photograph from his wall with his own hand.’
‘And you can give him no other picture to fill its place?’
‘He has a magnifique picture here, facing the window. See,’ Pouchée adjusted herself into a favourable light with an air of connoisseurship, ‘a magnifique portrait, just a little mildewed, of King William the Fourth. The fur on his Majesty’s cloak has been the admiration of many artists. Come in, ma mie, entrez. What are you afraid of?’
And Marjorie entered. She looked for a few seconds at the time-stained mezzotint which, with its black frame, its cheap glass, seemed but to make the wall whereon it hung more sorrowfully ugly. Then she crossed to the room’s one window—a diamond leaded casement through whose small dulled panes the side view of a crowded alley, of the corner of a still more crowded churchyard, was attainable.
A ponderous book lay on a chair beside the window. Marjorie Bartrand lifted it.
‘Marjorie, I forbid you to touch a book! Our gentleman studies for medicine. Medical works are not for the perusal of young girls.’
‘The girl of the future peruses everything! Quain’s “Elements of Anatomy,”’ cried Marjorie, holding the volume as high out of Pouchée’s reach as its weight would allow. ‘I wonder whether our gentleman would lend it to us, if we asked him prettily? We might study our bones together, Pouchée. Who knows, in days to come, that I may not go for a Natural Science Tripos?’
And—with the book still held aloft—her nimble fingers found their way to the title-page. In the top right-hand corner was a name, written in characters she knew:
‘Geoffrey Arbuthnot, January, 1880.’
For an instant Marjorie Bartrand turned ashen pale. Then as she recalled her position, as she realised that she had forced herself, unasked, into Geoffrey Arbuthnot’s room, the poor child crimsoned from throat to brow. She felt that the very soul within her had cause to blush over her temerity.