‘I have found my gardening scissors, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ she cried, emerging through the schoolroom window, a basket on her arm. ‘Flowers smell sweetest that are cut with the dew on them. I mean to cut some roses and cherry-pie for—for——’
‘Your wife,’ was on Marjorie’s lips, but she stopped herself abruptly, all Cassandra Tighe’s warnings about Geoffrey’s domestic embarrassments coming back to her.
‘Let me help you,’ said Geoffrey. A minute later Marjorie, on tiptoe, was vainly endeavouring to catch a bough of swaying yellow briar. ‘You are just one foot too short to reach those roses, Miss Bartrand.’
Marjorie sprang up in air. She plunged with bold final grasp among the thorns, and succeeded in getting scratches destined to mark her right hand for some weeks to come; scratches that might, perhaps, recall this moment to both of them in the pauses of some tough mathematical problem, some arid point in Latin grammar or Greek delectus.
‘The result of over-vaulting ambition.’ Thus from his calm altitude of six-foot-one Geff moralised. ‘How many roses am I to pick?’
‘You are to pick three beauties!’ said Marjorie, somewhat crestfallen. ‘Won’t you have the scissors? These briars prick cruelly.’
But Geff wanted no scissors; his skin, so he told her, was of about the same texture as a stout dog-skin glove. When the briar-roses were duly laid in Marjorie’s basket he put on the grave manner of his profession. It was his duty as a surgeon to make immediate inspection of her injuries.
‘You are losing a good deal of blood, Miss Bartrand.’ Taking both her hands, he held them up, in the streak of moonlight, not very distant from his lips. ‘But while there is life there is hope. Three, four, deep wounds! For my sake, don’t faint, if you can help it.’
‘Faint!’ Marjorie’s laugh was a thing good to hear; a thing fresh as the chatter of birds in April, pungent as the smell of new-turned earth. ‘I wonder whether any of the old Bartrands ever fainted. I mean, before they were guillotined! Confess, we are queer specimens, grandpapa and I, are we not, sir?’ Asking Geff this question, she left her hands in his simply until he should choose to let them go. The first ineffable coldness of girlhood was on her. She knew no more of passion than did her own roses. ‘Not very pleasant people to live with—say! in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir.’
‘So much must depend on the taste of him who survived the ordeal.’ Geoffrey Arbuthnot quietly surrendered the slim hands resting unresponsively in his. ‘At the present moment life in an out-of-the-way Guernsey manoir seems to me—endurable.’