saw Alix off next day. Her departure cast consternation through the Bradley household. An unfortunate love affair, the fact that Alix did not wish to marry Jerry Hamble, could not be made to bear the weight of such a sudden mystery.
“I always knew those Hambles would do her no good!” cried Rosemary.
“The truth is, if you ask me,” said Ruth, “that she wants to go back to France. She's never really cared about being here at all.”
But against this Jack and Francis protested hotly, asserting that Alix liked nothing better than playing games with them.
Poor Mrs. Bradley was dismayed. Giles could do nothing to make her understand. “But she's been happy here; I know she's been happy,” she said. “I see that you can't explain to her why she should stay with us. But, oh, Giles, she ought to stay till she is much, much older. We can take her away. I can take her to Edinburgh, to stay with the Raeburns, if she wants to avoid Mr. Hamble—I'll do anything to keep her.”
Giles could only reiterate: “Alix is very wise, Mummy. You must trust her to know best. I think she suspects already that things aren't happy with her mother; and she wants to be near her.”
His mother asked him not another question about madame Vervier. She made no surmises about Owen's friendship. Giles at moments wondered, with all her ingenuousness, whether some dim suspicion had not entered her mind, as it had entered Toppie's, and he blessed her for her gift of silence.
He thought for a moment that Alix was going to cry when she bade his mother good-bye; tears were in Mrs. Bradley's eyes.
“Darling, whenever you want to come back to us—you will know;—we'll always be waiting, Alix, dear.”
“Good-bye, old thing,” said Rosemary staunchly.
“We'll come to see you in France,” Ruth assured her, “at your Vaudettes place; though I do hate shingle to bathe on.”
“All of you must come, whenever you will,” Alix murmured, pale in her little blue buttoned cape. Alix knew what they did not know, that they would never be allowed to come.
Then he saw the last of her. She stood leaning on the railing of the steamer deck, Blaise in his basket beside her, and waved to him until the blue mist of the April day dissolved her form, and as he saw her disappear Giles felt a dreadful loneliness. Tame, flat, colourless did life become to him. The sense of Alix's presence had been in his mind like the sense of Alpine flowers brought within one's own garden precincts, sweet, strange, yet intimate; like the sense of mountain ranges on one's horizon, aloof, mysterious, yet visible. “Beautiful, darling creature,” he heard himself murmuring as he drove home through a country that had lost all savour. The loss of Toppie from his life was like a pervading, half-stupefied aching; but from the sharpness that the loss of Alix brought he saw how little in comparison Toppie's going meant real loss. He had never possessed Toppie. The ache might now be deeper, but it was still the same ache that the thought of Toppie had always meant.
He had not seen her. None of them had seen her again. And on the morning of Alix's departure they heard that she had returned to Bath. Another three days passed before a letter came for him. It was short, yet it brought him more comfort than he could have believed possible.
“Dear Giles,” she wrote, “I think I begin to understand all that you have tried to do for me. It was wrong of you; but I think I understand. I have been wrong, too. Perhaps this came to show me that one can love wrongly. I do not think I love him less now; only differently. I know that he suffered before he died. When I read his last letters now, I can see the suffering in them. I send my love to everybody.
“Always your friend, dear Giles,
And a postscript, written hurriedly, ran: “Keep poor, brave little Alix with you.”
Under the dry phrases he read the mastered anguish. But it was mastered. That was the comfort that Toppie's letter brought him. She had risen already above her own sense of personal wreckage and could contemplate its meaning. As her piercing intuition on the day among the birch-woods had led her to the portals of the truth, so now it had led her to its heart. She saw at last, truly, what Giles had done; she no longer misunderstood him. Even, perhaps, she had begun, dimly, to understand what manner of woman madame Vervier might be. Toppie was noble enough for that. It would appease rather than lacerate her heart to believe that the woman to whom Owen had given his heart was not ignoble.
It was on the morning of Toppie's letter that Jerry was ushered into Giles's study.