‘You ought to take me to the show, Geff,’ she pleaded, turning round half jestingly, half in earnest, to Geoffrey. ‘What would Linda Thorne, what would Gaston think, if I suddenly made my appearance among all the fine ladies of Guernsey?’
‘Linda Thorne might have her own views,’ said Gaston. ‘When Dinah Arbuthnot shows her face, every fine lady, in Guernsey, or elsewhere, must be on the spot eclipsed.’
Whatever Dinah thought, Geff knew that a certain insincerity underlay the speech, and controlled a pungent remark with effort. The friendship of the Arbuthnot trio was never more sharply paradoxical than at this moment.
CHAPTER XII YELLOW-BACKED NOVELS
The June rose-show stands second only to Her Majesty’s Birthday among the big events of the Channel Islands’ calendar.
By three o’clock the road between Petersport and the Arsenal plateau was filled with a growing stream of men and women. Simple rose lovers many of them, but some lovers of another kind. And some roses themselves! What buoyant young figures fluttered past the window whence Dinah Arbuthnot, shrouded from view, undreaming of her own future, watched the crowd! What ruddy fine complexions were here, what well-shapen noses and mouths, what dark Norman eyes! Why, you might scour half a dozen English counties before you could bring together as many handsome girls as would soon be within the Guernsey Arsenal’s four walls. Must not excuse be made—the thought was Dinah’s—for an artist who should long to stock his brain’s tablets with so much beauty, even though an idle tear or two, a little discontent in some one left at home, must be the price of his experience?
She strove her best to be magnanimous, to give a valiant ‘yes’ to this self-propounded question. Then, even as she made the effort, a group of persons drew nigh from the direction of Petersport, at the sight of whom poor Dinah’s magnanimity and the wifely heart that beat in her breast stood instantly at variance. Her hands turned cold and rigid. A prophecy, rather than an actual living look of jealous anger, swept all the youthful gentleness from her face.
A group of four persons: Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot, Mrs. Thorne, the small daughter Rahnee, and a native nurse. Dazzling was Mrs. Linda in whatever furbelows and head gear local Parisian milliners had impressed on the feminine Sarnian mind as the ‘last thing out.’ Overdecked in embroidery and ribbons was Rahnee, a sorrowfully thin little child, with dark-ringed eyes, sallow cheeks, bangles on wrist. A typical Indian child, perverse, sickly, unruled, and who at the present moment was dancing, knowingly and deliberately, on her mother’s fragile flounces at every second step.