‘Well, and there is my husband walking with him.’
‘Your husband! Mrs. Arbuthnot?’
Marjorie’s world was reeling. A possibility—she knew not of what—a wild and passionate hope trembled on the outside edge of her thoughts.
‘Perhaps I am not a fair judge,’ murmured Dinah, the two young men having been arrested on their road by that incorrigible button-seizer, Doctor Thorne, ‘but, to my mind, Gaston must always be the most noticeable man in any company he enters, no matter how high that company may be.’
‘Gaston?’
Marjorie Bartrand was in a state of such bewilderment that the echoing of Dinah Arbuthnot’s words seemed about as great originality in the way of speech as she was mistress of.
‘Geoffrey must have sounded my husband’s praises to you pretty often. That is a right good point of poor Geff’s, his love and admiration for Gaston. At Cambridge he was called the handsome American. I know it,’ said Dinah, with earnestness which became those sweet lips of hers mightily, ‘because Aunt Susan had relations in the town, on Market Hill, you know. Before my marriage we used to hear something flattering of Gaston every day. It is the same in London. The tailors will give him any credit. I believe they would make his coats gratis so long as they got his promise to wear them.’
‘And Mr. Geoffrey Arbuthnot?’ It cost Marjorie no small effort just then to force Geff’s name from her lips. ‘What relationship is there between him and you?’
‘Geoffrey is our first cousin. His father and my husband’s died, both of them, when their children were young. Gaston has always been Geoffrey’s good genius.’ In saying this Dinah believed herself to be enunciating truth, clear as crystal. ‘They did not meet as boys. Geoffrey spent his young years in a gloomy city school. My husband was brought up—you can tell it, they say, by his accent—in Paris. When they came together in Cambridge nothing could be more different than their positions. Poor Geff, a scholar at John’s, was forced to work without amusements, almost without friends, for his Tripos, while Gaston——’
‘Mr. Gaston Arbuthnot had livelier things than work to think about,’ suggested Marjorie, as Gaston’s wife paused.