Miss Bartrand led the way, her face held somewhat aloft, into a room plainly furnished as a study, and strewed with books and papers, on the west side of the inner drawing-room. As Geoffrey followed, every sense tempered to a keener edge than usual, he could not help remarking with what curious grace Marjorie’s raven-black tresses were braided. He had been to a few, very few, London entertainments in his life, had glanced at most varieties of our current female ‘heads;’ none tolerable to him beside a certain recollection of soft gold worn in little waves, that way poor Dinah had with her curls, upon a Madonna forehead. But Marjorie’s ebon locks gathered high, in one thick coil, upon the summit of her head, compelled his admiration. The style was too foreign, altogether, for English taste. And the white and red dress, the gaudy waist ribbon, were too evidently got up for effect, Geoffrey decided, now that he could draw breath and criticise. The complexion, too, to a man who for years had had a living ideal of snow and rose-bloom before him, was certainly sallow. And those great black eyes....
Stopping short, Marjorie waited for her visitor on the schoolroom threshold. At the moment he overtook her, she turned, looked up at him. And behold! her eyes were blue; intensely blue as, I think, only Irish or Spanish eyes ever are; with a sweep of jetty lash, with a hidden laughter in them, although the possibilities of temper still lurked round the corner of her lips.
‘This is to be your torture chamber. From the time I was five I have worked myself up to my present state of ignorance at that inky desk you see, and under the rule of a long line of governesses, most of whom gave me and themselves up in despair. Now put me to the test, if you please, Mr. Arbuthnot. Don’t spare my feelings. Treat me as you would treat any backward schoolboy.’
And Geff Arbuthnot obeyed the command to the letter. He did not spare her feelings.
Marjory Bartrand’s attainments were to the last degree patchy and scrappy; the typical attainments to be looked for in a quick, self-willed child, indifferently taught by a succession of teachers, and whose faulty studies had been supplemented by an avid, indiscriminate consumption of good books.
‘Your classics are weak, Miss Bartrand.’
Geoffrey remarked this, pushing papers and books aside, and looking kindly across the table into his pupil’s face.
‘Oh! I never liked the subjects. I knew that you would say so.’
With an effort Marjorie Bartrand kept her voice under control.