‘Some day,’ observed Geff, as she maintained a caustic silence, ‘I mean you to tell me what you wished for, a quarter of an hour ago, under the cedars.’
Marjorie Bartrand turned from him, the determination of a long lineage of dead, high-tempered Bartrands on her face. To command, implied or spoken, had she never yet bowed, during her seventeen years of life, without asking the reason why.
She asked nothing now. Her cheeks—happily, the starlight betrayed no secrets—were glowing damask. For the girl knew, deep in her fiery heart, what the wish was; a wish by no means unconnected with her feelings towards Geoffrey Arbuthnot.
CHAPTER VII ON THE BRINK OF A FLIRTATION
Meanwhile the solstice night grew at each instant more purple, more mysterious. Geff felt himself in love with midsummer starlight, with Guernsey, with Tintajeux. Marjorie he would fain have engaged for a game of hide-and-seek among the neighbouring orchards, or of follow-my-leader along the beach, white in the crescent moon’s shining. For what was this poor small heiress but a child, with a child’s cold, sweet, unopened heart, a child’s quick temper, a child’s readiness for play, in whatever shape play might happen to be offered her!
‘You will not tell me your wish to-night, Miss Bartrand. Never mind. You will tell it me some day. To show you I bear no malice, you shall hear mine. My present wish, as I must leave Tintajeux, is to return to Miller’s Hotel by the longest road possible. You could point it out to me?’
‘I should rather think so!’ cried Marjorie, brusquely. ‘If you don’t mind a quarter of an hour’s nice hard scramble, your plan is to go up the Gros Nez cliffs, about a mile from this, and so back to your hotel along the edge of the steep. You are tolerably steady on the legs, I suppose?’
Tolerably! A too shallow purse, a too well endowed brain had combined to force Geoffrey Arbuthnot out of the ranks of the big and world-renowned athletes. But ask the All England football team, ask the men against whom the All England football team has played, if Arbuthnot of John’s be tolerably steady on his legs!