"Aha, Maurice," continued Geoffrey, brightening up from painful memories, "you have a noble mind for sequences. What about the tutor? Just so, what about him?" and Geoffrey slapped Rankin on the back heartily, as a pleasanter memory presented itself gratefully.
"I wish you would not strike me like that. I am thinking of going to church to-night, unless disabled. What about your beastly tutor? For goodness' sake, do drive on!"
"Oh, well, I can't tell you much about that, not just now. Of course, the first thing I did was to pay him a call at his lodgings in London. Your great mind saw that this was natural. That call was a relief. I came out when it was finished and told somebody to look after him, and then took passage for New York in a vessel that sailed from London on the same day."
Margaret and Rankin smiled at the grim way in which he spoke about the visit to the tutor.
"On arriving in New York I got a small position in a Wall Street broker's office, and learned the business. From that I went, with the assistance of their recommendation, into a bank. While in this bank I fell in with some young fellows from Montreal, and afterward stayed with them in Montreal during holidays. They wanted me to come to that city, and I liked the English way of the Canadians, so I came. On entering the Victoria Bank I got good recommendations from the one I had left. From Montreal I was moved to the head office, and here I am."
There was much to render Margaret thoughtful in this story that Geoffrey told. She was pleased to find that he belonged to the English nobility, because it seemed to assist her opinion when, with the confidence of love, she had placed him in a nobility such as she hoped could exist among mankind. Otherwise, the fact that there was a title in his family meant very little to her. Her own father's family would have declined any title in England involving change of name. What did affect her as a thinking woman, and one given to the study of natural history, was the awful gap on the other side of the house. Following so closely upon the assurance that he was well born, it was a cruel wrench. His interests were hers now, and it seemed as if they suffered jointly—she, through him. She felt that all this bound them more together, and she did her best to appear unconscious and gay.
He looked at her when he had finished, and, behind their smiles, each saw that the other was trying to make the best of things—that there was something now between them to be feared, which might rise up in the future and give them pain.
CHAPTER XVIII.
Those aggressive impulses inherited from the pre-social state—those tendencies to seek self-satisfaction regardless of injury to other beings, which are essential to a predatory life, constitute an anti-social force, tending ever to cause conflict and eventual separation of citizens.—Herbert Spencer, Synthetic Philosophy.