“How did you manage to pass her off as your wife?”
“I told you how, as we were driving from the station here.”
“I was thinking of something else. Tell me again.”
Arnold told him once more what had happened at the inn. Geoffrey listened, without making any remark. He balanced the paper-knife vacantly on one of his fingers. He was strangely sluggish and strangely silent.
“All _that_ is done and ended,” said Arnold shaking him by the shoulder. “It rests with you now to get me out of the difficulty I’m placed in with Blanche. Things must be settled with Miss Silvester to-day.”
“Didn’t you tell me to consult Sir Patrick before I married her?”
“Well--I am waiting for a chance with Sir Patrick.”
“And then--” He looked at Arnold for the first time. “Then,” he said, “you may consider it settled.”
He suddenly looked down again at the blotting-pad. “Yes--the marriage.”
Arnold offered his hand in congratulation. Geoffrey never noticed it. His eyes were off the blotting-pad again. He was looking out of the window near him.
“I believe our friends are in the garden,” said Arnold. “Sir Patrick may be among them. I’ll go and see.”
The instant his back was turned Geoffrey snatched up a sheet of note-paper. “Before I forget it!” he said to himself. He wrote the word “Memorandum” at the top of the page, and added these lines beneath it:
“He asked for her by the name of his wife at the door. He said, at dinner, before the landlady and the waiter, ‘I take these rooms for my wife.’ He made _her_ say he was her husband at the same time. After that he stopped all night. What do the lawyers call this in Scotland?--(Query: a marriage?)”
After folding up the paper he hesitated for a moment. “No!” he thought, “It won’t do to trust to what Miss Lundie said about it. I can’t be certain till I have consulted Sir Patrick himself.”
He put the paper away in his pocket, and wiped the heavy perspiration from his forehead. He was pale--for _him,_ strikingly pale--when Arnold came back.
“Any thing wrong, Geoffrey?--you’re as white as ashes.”
Arnold pointed to the window. Sir Patrick was crossing the lawn, on his way to the library with a newspaper in his hand; and the guests at Windygates were accompanying him. Sir Patrick was smiling, and saying nothing. The guests were talking excitedly at the tops of their voices. There had apparently been a collision of some kind between the old school and the new. Arnold directed Geoffrey’s attention to the state of affairs on the lawn.