‘Because I cannot, because I am blankly unimaginative.’
For a few moments Marjorie stood masterfully inactive. Then she flew discreetly back into the shadow of the lane. On a slightly rising mound she stopped. What light there was touched the upper half of her face, and Geoffrey could see her eyes. He knew that her mood, for Marjorie Bartrand, was a softened one.
‘The flowers are for yourself, Mr. Arbuthnot,’ so her voice rang through the sea-scented night. ‘For your better self, you understand. Don’t lose my ribbon, and, if you can help it, don’t fall over the Gros Nez cliffs. Good-night.’
And with a wave of her hand—though he was blankly unimaginative, Geoffrey believed it might be with a wafted kiss from her finger tips—she disappeared.
Geff Arbuthnot’s first experience in snubbing had come to an end.
Pondering over many things, most of all over the cruelties and caprices of youthful woman, he ran lightly down the ankle-deep water-lane, then across a miniature bay of argent, shell-strewn sands, to the base of Gros Nez cliffs. The ridge rose sheer above his head, a dark wall of over a hundred and fifty feet, polished as glass to the limit of the breakers, but, above that line, fissured, lichened, rough.
Miss Bartrand’s sarcasm had not exaggerated the gravity of the ascent. The man who in an uncertain light should successfully scale Gros Nez must have not only his hands and feet, but his wits thoroughly under command.
And here the loop of ribbon attached to Marjorie’s flowers proved of great use.
I have tried to represent in Geoffrey a man little moved by the nicer shades of cultivated or hothouse feeling, a man more likely to be wrapped up in one grim fact of the mortuary or dissecting-room than in all the pretty uncertainties of sentiment put together. But to-night a change had certainly passed over him. Before beginning his climb he found a delicate pleasure in suspending Marjorie’s bouquet, exactly in the mode her fingers had taught him, round his neck. He found a pleasure—the cliff’s dizzy height hardly won—in unknotting her ribbon, smoothing it out from its creases with a hand unversed in millinery tasks, finally in hiding it away, jealously, in the breast-pocket of his jacket.