The

Little French Girl

BY

ANNE DOUGLAS SEDGWICK

(Mrs. Basil de Sélincourt)

Author of “Adrienne Toner,” “Christmas Roses, and Other Stories”

“Tante,” etc.

Boston and New York

Houghton Mifflin Company

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY ANNE DOUGLAS DE SÉLINCOURT

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

SECOND IMPRESSION, AUGUST, 1924

THIRD IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924

FOURTH IMPRESSION, SEPTEMBER, 1924

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

The Little French Girl

PART I

CHAPTER I

A clock struck eight, a loud yet distant clock. The strokes, Alix thought, seemed to glide downwards rather than to fall through the fog and tumult of the station, and, counting them as they emerged, they were so slow and heavy that they made her think of tawny drones pushing their way forth from among the thickets of hot thyme in the jardin potager at Montarel. Sitting straightly in her corner of the Victoria waiting-room, the little French girl fixed her mind upon the picture thus evoked so that she should not feel too sharply the alarming meaning of the hour, and seemed again to watch the blunt, sagacious faces of the drones as they paused in sulky deliberation on the tip of a spray before launching themselves into the sunlight. What could be more unlike Montarel than this cold and paltry scene? What more unlike that air, tranced with sunlight and silence, than this dense atmosphere? Yet the heavy, gliding notes brought back the drones so vividly that she found herself again in the high-terraced garden under the sun-baked old château. The magnolia-trees ate into the crumbling walls and opened lemon-scented cups beneath her as she leaned her arms on the hot stone and looked across the visionary plains to the Alps on the horizon, blue, impalpable, less substantial to the sight than the clouds that sailed in grandiose snowy fleets above them. Alix had always felt that it was like taking great breaths to see the plains and like spreading immense wings to see the mountains, and something of invulnerable dignity, of inaccessible remoteness in her demeanour as she sat there might well have been derived from generations who had lived and died in the presence of natural sublimities. Her brows were contemplative, her lips proud. She was evidently a foreigner, a creature nurtured in climes golden yet austere and springing from an aromatic, rocky soil. The pallor of her extreme fatigue could not efface the sunny tones of her skin; her hair was the blacker for its bronzed lights, and if her eyes were blue, it was not the English blue of a water-side forget-me-not, but the dense, impalpable blue of the Alps seen across great distances.

Two women, pausing on their way out to look at her, drew her mind back from Montarel. She knew that she might look younger than her years. Her bobbed hair was cut straight across her forehead and her skirt displayed a childish length of leg. It was no wonder that, seeing her there, alone, they should speak of her with curiosity, perhaps with solicitude; for there was kindness in their eyes. But she did not like pity, and, drawing herself up more straightly, wrapping her arms in the scarf that muffled her shoulders, she fixed her eyes blankly above their heads until they had passed on. They were kind women; but very ugly. Like jugs. All the people that she had seen since landing on this day of grey and purple flesh-tones had made her think of the earthenware jugs that old Marthe used to range along her upper shelves in the little dark shop that stood on the turn of the road leading down from the château to the village. Their eyes were joyless yet untragic. Their clothes expressed no enterprise. She did not think that they could feel ecstasy, ever, or despair. Yet they were the people of Captain Owen, and she could not be really forgotten, for Captain Owen’s family were to come for her. It was only some mistake; but more than the strokes of the clock the women’s eyes had made her feel how late it was, how young she was, and how hungry.

Maman’s déjeuner, the long buttered petits pains with ham in them, she had eaten on the boat; and, far away, seen across the leaden waters of the November channel, was the bright petit déjeuner, in Paris that morning, and Maman before the wood fire, her beauty still clouded by sleep, sweet, sombre, and gay as only she could be, her russet locks tossed back and her white arms bare in the white woollen peignoir. “They will, I know, be good to my darling,” Maman had said, buttering her roll while Albertine brought in the coffee, “and keep her warm and well-fed through this hard winter.” Firmness and resource breathed from Maman. She knew what she was doing and Alix saw herself powerless in her hands. Yet she could read her, too. Even though she could not always interpret the words, she could always read Maman, and the meaning, as it were, of the sentence would come to her in a feeling rather than in an idea. She had felt that morning that Maman’s heart was not at ease. It was true that the Armistice had been signed but the other day, that the war was hardly over, and that everything would be more expensive than ever. It was true that she was going to friends, though to unknown friends; to the family of their dear Captain Owen, killed in battle only nine months ago. He had so often said that they must know his family, and it had been his mother who had written so kindly to say that Giles would meet her. But if all this were so natural, why had she felt that touch of artifice in Maman’s manner, that resource in her so many reasons? Perhaps they did not really want her. And perhaps there was some mistake and they did not expect her to-night. If no one came, what was she to do? She had only five shillings in her purse. The porter had placed her little box and her dressing-case on the seat beside her, and if no one came was she to sit on here all night, in the waiting-room, this horrid feeling, half hunger, half fear, gnawing at the pit of her stomach? “Dieu, que j’ai faim!” she thought; and as she now leaned back her head and closed her eyes, the sadness that flowed into her carried her far back to Montarel again and it was Grand-père that she saw, passing under the pollarded lime-trees with his dragging footsteps and looking down on the ground as he went, with no eyes for the climbing vineyards, no eyes for the plains, the river, the Alps; his short white beard and jutting nose giving him still the air of a commandant, high on his fortress; but so old, so ill, so poor and so despairing.

The dappled shadows of the limes lay brightly blue at his feet. His bleached hands were clasped behind him on his stick. He wore a black silk skull-cap and a white silk handkerchief was knotted around his neck. It had always frightened her a little to see Grand-père, and it frightened her now to remember him, the commandant, defeated, broken; yet still with that sombre fire smouldering in his eyes. “Tout-à-fait une tête de Port-Royal,” she had heard someone say of him once; and so a devout noble of the time of Louis Quatorze might have looked. Only she did not see Grand-père as appeased, withdrawn from the world and its illusions; he brooded, rather, in bitterness upon them. He minded everything so terribly.

She remembered as if it were yesterday the dreadful summer afternoon when the bell had clanged hoarsely in the courtyard, and Mélanie, wiping her steaming arms on her apron, had come clapping in her savates across the paving-stones to let in the opulent gentleman who had arrived in his motor to take away the Clouets. That was the day that had revealed to her what Grand-père’s poverty must be. He had sold the Clouets at last; after selling so many things. The great gaunt salles, the little panelled salons, the rows of incommodious bedrooms, looking, from high up, over the plains, all were empty; and the Clouets now were to go.

With a child’s awed heart, half comprehending, Alix had followed Mélanie and the stranger, up the winding staircase in the turret—Mélanie took him by that circuitous route so that Grand-père should catch no glimpse of him; along the chill stone passages, to the little room where she and Grand-père sat and read in the evenings. The lit de repos stood there, draped in its tattered brocades, dignified and irrelevant, for no one ever thought of lying down on it; and Grand-père’s old bergère, and her tabouret drawn up to the table before her histories. And there, upon the sea-green panelled walls, the silvery Clouets hung, Mouverays among them; frigidly smiling in their ruffs.

Mélanie, mute, grim, inscrutable, helped the gentleman from Paris to take them down, one by one, and wrap them up and carry them across the courtyard to the waiting car: and Alix had watched it all, knowing that a final disaster had fallen upon her house.

But poverty had not been the only reason for Grand-père’s bitterness. Even when he sat to watch her and Marie-Jeanne, his hands folded on his stick, quiet and at peace in the evening air as it might have seemed, she was aware of the bitterness brooding there, unappeased, at the bottom of the deep, considering look bent upon them. There had been no time to think about it while she played with Marie-Jeanne. Marie-Jeanne was the blacksmith’s daughter and there had been many happy days with her at Montarel. Marie-Jeanne had black eyes and her pig-tails were tied together with red tape and plaited so tightly that they surrounded her shrewd little face with a wiry circle. They brought up a family of dolls in a corner of the jardin potager; Alix was the father, for she had never cared fosteringly for dolls, and Marie-Jeanne the mother. They whipped their tops in the courtyard where the tall blue lilies stood in the damp about the well. The Renaissance wrought-iron windlass was all rusted and broken; and the lilies had thrust their cord-like roots through the cracked earthenware of their great pots. Looking out of the door in the courtyard, one might see the cheerful matelassière sitting in the shade of the enormous horse-chestnut-tree on the wayside grass. The heaped wool seemed to curdle and foam about her like a turbulent yet cosy sea. She combed it out on her loom and smiled and nodded at Alix. “Bonjour, la jolie petite demoiselle,” she would say. Mélanie grumbled at the matelassière and said she was a thief; but she gave Alix a bowl of café au lait to carry out to her when she remade their mattresses, and Alix felt a pleasing sense of complicity in lawlessness when the matelassière, bending her lips to the steaming coffee, would close one eye at her in a long wink. She seemed a very happy person.

The road led down to the village, stony, steep, and golden with the vineyards on either hand. The little houses were washed with pink and fawn and cream and their roofs were the colour of the underside of an old mushroom. Strings of onions hung from their eaves, and milk cheeses in flat wicker baskets. After the village came the river and the old stone bridge that led across to the forest, tall and dark, marching up the mountain and haunted by legends of ghosts and knights and fairies. Mélanie, when she was in a good humour, would tell of these, seated in the evening on her own particular little terrace where she kept the fowls and picked over the herbs that were to be dried for tisane. But old Mère Gavrault was the best story-teller, and Alix was sometimes allowed to go to the forest with her and find cêpes and help her to gather faggots for her winter store. Mère Gavrault told stories of goblins and headless riders. They would have been blood-curdling stories, had she not told them with such an unmoved, smiling face. It was difficult to think that Mère Gavrault would find anything blood-curdling. She had lost so many children and grandchildren and her husband had been drowned in the river. She had lived through everything, and only wanted faggots to keep her warm in winter. Her face in its close, clean cap of coarse linen was hard and brown and wrinkled. Yet she was only sixty-five years old; the age of madame Gérardin, one of Maman’s friends in Paris, whom Alix did not like. Clean, clean, old Mère Gavrault, and she had lived through everything and only wanted faggots; while madame Gérardin wanted innumerable things—cigarettes all day, for one of them; and if one were to wash her bright countenance, what strange colours would stain the water, what thick, pale sediments sink! Almost passionately Alix felt her preference for Mère Gavrault, who smelt of dew and smoke and who was as clean as a stone or an apple. Madame Gérardin was as much Paris as Mère Gavrault was Montarel. Yet Maman was Paris, too, and there was nothing in the world Alix loved as she did her mother. She had always loved her, and longed for her, through all those mysterious yearly separations that took her away from her to set her down at distant Montarel. And Grand-père must have known that she longed for her. Was it not here that the deepest reason for the bitterness lay? He had never spoken to her of her mother. Never; never. Not once through all the years that she had gone to him. They had not been unhappy, those days of childhood with Marie-Jeanne at Montarel; even without Maman they had known a childish gladness. But it was as if, from the earliest age, she had had, as it were, to be happy round the corner. One’s heart was there, aching, if one looked at it; and one tiptoed away cautiously and, at a safe distance, raced off to join Marie-Jeanne. But at night, when she could no longer hide from her heart, all the sadness of Grand-père’s eyes would flow into her and she would lie, for hours, awake, thinking of him and of Maman.

It was because of Maman that his footsteps had dragged and his eyes had fixed themselves so obstinately on the ground; perhaps it was because of her that the Clouets had been sold;—Maman who was his daughter-in-law and who did not bear his name. “La belle madame Vervier; divorcée, vous savez.”—The phrase came back to her, with its knife-like cut, as she had first heard it whispered. It conjured up a vision of harsh, cruel repudiation, of Maman driven forth from Montarel, running out at the courtyard door, down the steep road, like one of the hapless princesses in the fairy-tales;—crying, flying, stumbling on the stones. Grand-père and her father had driven her out. So it must have been. Because of some fault; some disastrous fault. Yet they had been cruel. Her father’s portrait hung in the dining-room at Montarel. He was in uniform; young, though grey-haired; with stern lips and cold blue eyes; like Grand-père’s; like her own. She was a Mouveray in every tint and feature; yet how unlike them. For though, by chance currents, such other aspects of the story as a child may apprehend came drifting to her, the first picture of harsh repudiation made a background to the later knowledge, and she saw Maman as a delicate flower or fruit crushed and broken between stony hands. Passionately she was Maman’s child; passionately she repelled their harshness. Yet her heart ached for Grand-père, and his sadness flowed into her as she sat with closed eyes thinking of him, of Marie-Jeanne, of Mère Gavrault and Montarel; Grand-père dead and the château sold; the solitary, sunny old château on the hill that she would never see again.

CHAPTER II

Alix opened her eyes. Someone was standing still before her. Of all the footsteps that came and went, these had stopped. For a moment, so deeply was she sunk in the vision of the past, she stared bewildered at the young man in khaki, forgetting where she was and how she had come there. Then a jostling, irrelevant crowd of recent memories pressed forward:—“They will be glad to see my darling”; the grey Channel; the faces like earthenware jugs. And, even before she had identified him as monsieur Giles, a suffocating relief rose in her at the sight of him, while, strangely, one more memory seemed, on the threshold of the new life, to offer itself with a special significance, a special interpretation of what she was to find;—the memory of Maman, herself, and Captain Owen standing together in the Place de la Concorde and of Maman’s voice saying to him, as they looked at the spot where the guillotine had been, at Strasbourg, still in her crêpe, and up the Champs Élysées, while splendid clouds sailed in the blue above them:—“We are not like you, mon ami. Tocsins, tumbrils, trumpets are in our blood;—Saint Bartholomew; the Revolution; Napoleon. Your history knows no rivers of blood and no arcs of triumph.”

It was monsieur Giles, of course, and he was like Captain Owen, only en laid. He was tall and young and grave with round, solemn eyes, staring at her, and a big mouth. And he was very good; she saw that at once; and then she saw that he was deeply troubled. “I’m so horribly sorry,” was what he said. But it was more than embarrassment at the miscarriage of their meeting and dismay at her plight, though the echo of her own distressful state came to her from his face. She, who from the earliest age seemed to have been fashioned by life to read the signs of discomfort and restraint in the faces of those about her, knew now unerringly that this good young man, who had no tocsins or tumbrils or trumpets in his blood, was deeply troubled at seeing her. “I’m so horribly sorry,” he repeated, and he seized her dressing-case, Maman’s old discarded one with the tarnished monogram “H. de M.,” from which the crest had fallen away. “You’ve been here for hours,” he said. “Your mother’s letter did not give the day. Her wire only came this afternoon, late. We are a good way from London and trains are bad.” He was not trying to throw the blame on anybody. His voice accepted it all for himself; but she knew that the mistake had been Maman’s, Maman so forceful, so practical, yet so careless, too. Maman had taken it for granted that they lived quite near London; she had taken it for granted that the wire would arrive in good time.

“Have you had anything to eat?” monsieur Giles almost shouted at her. “Where’s your box? Is this all? I’m so horribly sorry.”

“Yes, this is all. It has not been so long, really. I have not eaten. I was afraid to go to the restaurant lest I should miss you.”

Her English was so good that she saw him at once a little reassured. He had shouted like that partly from embarrassment and partly because he thought she might only understand if he talked loud. His face, as he seized her box in his other hand, echoed her smile as it had echoed her distress. It was a kind face. It echoed people’s feelings easily.

“Let me take the bag; you cannot carry all,” said Alix.

But he shoved himself sideways through the door and then held it open while she passed out, commenting as he did so, “But, I say, you’re not a child!”

“A year makes a great difference,” said Alix. “And I was not really so young; already fifteen, when Captain Owen first saw me, last October, in Cannes.”

Monsieur Giles said nothing to this, and she wondered what Captain Owen had written of her and Maman after that first meeting.

Now they were sitting opposite each other at a little table that seemed to have a great many cruets and salt-cellars upon it. It was a very bright and very ugly room, and through the doors, opening and shutting incessantly, came the muffled roar of incoming trains; but after the waiting-room it was homelike. She was safe with monsieur Giles. He was a person who made you feel safe. Soup was put before them, all substance and no savour, but she ate it eagerly, and said that, yes, please, she would like fish.

“And then the beef,” said Giles to the waiter, who had a pallid face and looked, Alix thought, detached and meditative as he was, like a littérateur.

“I don’t advise the beef, Sir,” he said in a low, impassive voice. “It’s specially tough to-day, Sir. You’d do better with the mutton.”

“Mutton, then, by all means!” said Giles, laughing. “Rather nice, that, what?” he asked, smiling at Alix across the table when the waiter was gone.

He showed beautiful white teeth when he smiled. They were his only beauty; though she liked his golden-green eyes, fig-coloured. His face was vehement, almost violent in structure with a prominent nose and so high a top to his head that it seemed to be boiling over. Though he looked so kind, he looked also as if he could get angry rather easily, with a steady, reasonable anger, and the more she observed him the less she found him like his brother. Captain Owen’s lips, though broad, had been delicately curved, and his nut-shaped eyes had always seemed to smile a little lazily. Sweetness rather than strength had been in his face and an air of taking everything lightly. She had always felt of him that he would fight just as if he were playing tennis; whereas when Giles fought, she felt sure, he would clench his teeth and look fierce and sick. And though he was younger than Captain Owen, he was far more worn, strangely worn for one so young; and he was not at all homme du monde.

Captain Owen had always struck them as homme du monde. But even Maman could not have been sure about that, since she had so emphatically impressed upon Alix that she was to define for her with exactitude the social status of the Bradleys. Maman was sure that they were not noblesse; but Alix was to tell her whether they were petite noblesse or haute bourgeoisie, or, tout simplement, commerçants.

“Not that, I think,” said Maman thoughtfully; “but with another race it is difficult to tell.”

“And since Captain Owen was so much our friend, what interest can it have for us?” Alix had inquired, with the dryness she could sometimes show towards Maman.

Maman had replied that it made no difference at all as far as an individual, at large, as it were, unattached and irresponsible in a foreign country, was concerned; but that it did make a difference, all the difference, when it came to the family itself and its milieu. “At all events, they are rich, I am sure of that,” said Maman; but Alix, as she ate her fish and looked across at monsieur Giles, was not so sure. He was rather shabby; even for an old uniform.

“You know,” he said, “I’m not going to take you to Sussex to-night. It’s too late and you’re too tired. Don’t try to eat that nasty sauce; scrape it off and leave it. I apologize for our sauces, Mademoiselle.—I’m going to take you to my aunt’s. She’ll be able to put us up and I’ll telephone to her now. Don’t run away in disgust with us and our sauces, while I’m gone.”

There was no danger of that. Even when he was not there, Alix felt herself safe in the hands of monsieur Giles, and the waiter when he brought the mutton helped her very considerately, as though he recognized her as young and tired and a foreigner, and placed before her, almost with a paternal air, a dish half of which was devoted to pommes de terre à l’eau and half to a slab of dark green cabbage strangely struck into squares.

“I’ve wired to Mummy, too,” said Giles, when he came back, “and told her we’ll turn up to-morrow morning; so that’s all right.” And now he asked her questions. What did she read? Did she care for pictures and music? How had she learned to speak such admirable English?

Alix told him that she and Maman had often spoken English together and that she had had English governesses. “I always liked your books, too. That made it easier. ‘Alice’ and the rabbit and ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and ‘Dombey and Son.’ Have you read those?”

He said he had. “There are no books in France for girls to read as far as I can make out,” he added; and Alix, suspecting a hint of detraction, replied: “Our chefs d’œuvre are for later in life. Perhaps great books cannot be written for girls.”

“I question that!” said Giles, smiling at her. “Great books should be written for everybody.”

“We can read Racine and Corneille and Lamartine,” said Alix.

“And Bossuet,” said Giles, grinning, “and ‘Les Pensées de Pascal.’ Awfully jolly, isn’t it! Unfortunate child;—or, rather, fortunate, since you can read us.”

Alix reflected, a little vexed.

“Here’s another kind of sauce,” said Giles, as a portion of apricot tart was placed before each of them surrounded by a yellow glutinous substance. “I’ll grant you your cooking if you’ll grant me the best books for everybody.—Anyhow, I see you’re too tired to argue. We’ll fight it out some other time.”

“But how did you come to appreciate our cooking so well?” Alix asked. “It is made with flour, this sauce, not properly cooked;—that is the trouble.”

“The trouble is that it’s the same sauce as the one that went with the fish, only coloured to look different.—I travelled in France when I was a boy, you see. And I’m just back from nine months there. I was in the East before that, for the first years of the war.”

“In France for nine months? Why did you not come to see us?” Alix asked. She asked it without stopping to think, for it was so strange that they should not have seen Captain Owen’s brother.

“I was at the front, and wanted all my leaves at home,” said Giles, and he smiled very brightly at her. He did not look at all embarrassed now; yet she had a surmise. He stopped himself from showing embarrassment. Surely he could have come? Had he not wanted to come? And he was going on talking, while he paid the bill, as if he felt she might be asking herself that question: “My aunt lives in a part of London called Chelsea. At the time ‘Pride and Prejudice’ was written, it was all gardens there; it’s mostly flats now. We’ve changed very much, in all sorts of ways from the England of ‘Pride and Prejudice’; just as you have from the France of Lamartine.”

Everything was dimmed with fog as they drove through the streets and she was suddenly very sleepy, yet she kept on thinking, as she looked out, of those nine months that monsieur Giles had been in France. He must have been there, then, when Captain Owen was killed. How strange that he had never come, and that Captain Owen had never spoken of him. She was too sleepy, however, to think of it very carefully and, when they stopped at the brightly lighted door of a large building, she stumbled in alighting so that Giles, with a steadying “Hello, hello,” put a hand under her elbow and guided her into a lift; and, still so sustained, she was presented a moment later to a stout, rosy lady with pince-nez and smooth grey hair who herself opened the door of a white and green appartement and said: “Poor child, she must be put to bed at once.”

From Giles she passed to Aunt Bella, who smelt of toilet vinegar and had a seal ring on her small glazed-looking hand.

After that Alix was only drowsily aware of a little pink bedroom where a row of pink, blue and green water-colours framed in gilt hung upon the walls. Her head sank into a pillow and all the troubled thoughts into sleep; but, just before she was quite oblivious, a little tap came to the door; it opened softly and a tall head, silhouetted on the lighted hall, looked in, and Giles said, “Good-night, Alix.”

It was treating her as a child and it made her feel very safe.

CHAPTER III

For many hours the little French girl slept on dreamlessly, and when she woke it was as if an abyss of space and time lay between her and yesterday morning. As she gazed up at the dim ceiling, only the most recent memories wove themselves softly into her returning sense of identity: the yellow sauce that Giles had told her to scrape off; his faded khaki necktie; Aunt Bella’s small, glazed hands. Kindness, security, lay behind these appearances, and an apprehension of pain seemed at first substanceless and irrational. Then, with a gathering effort, it shaped itself: France; Maman; what was she doing and was she happy?—She had not been really happy yesterday morning. Why had monsieur Giles been so troubled when they met? And why had he never come to see them in all the nine months he had been in France?

There was a tap at the door and an elderly maid came in, neatly capped, bearing a brass hot-water-can, which she stood in the basin. Then she drew the curtains and turned up the electric light and placed by the bedside a very amusing little tea-set on a tray. It was Alix’s initiation into early-morning tea, and for a moment, as she gazed at it, she feared it was to be all her breakfast until the maid, withdrawing, said, very distinctly, as though she might be deaf: “Breakfast at nine, Miss; and the bathroom is opposite.”

That was all right, then. Alix lifted the lid of the little pot and sniffed at the tea and decided that the afternoon was the only time at which she felt drawn to it. And as for the two slices of bread and butter, they were very thin, but she would rather save her appetite. Meanwhile there was a real brouillard de Londres pressing close against the window, so close that one could see nothing—Alix had jumped up to look—except the spectral top of a tree below the window and, below the tree, a blurred street-lamp. It was interesting, exciting, to get up like this as if it were after dinner instead of before breakfast, for there were lights in the hall and bathroom and one’s morning face had such a curious look as one combed one’s hair under an electric bulb. She forgot her waking apprehensions as she dressed, and when she went into the dining-room and found Giles there, the day seemed to have started really well.

Giles was reading a newspaper, standing under the light. The room was small and he looked very large in it; so did a pink, frilled ham on the sideboard and an engraving hanging over the mantelpiece of an old, erect gentleman, en favoris, his hands on a book and with a very high collar. When Aunt Bella came in a moment later, they all seemed quite crowded between the fog outside and the steam from the shining kettle on the table, and it was rather, Alix thought, as though they were floating in a little boat on a misty sea or suspended—this was a more exciting comparison—high in the air in an aeroplane.

She was seated opposite the mantelpiece, Giles under it, and, following her eyes, Aunt Bella said: “That is our great Mr. Gladstone, Alix. You’ve heard of Mr. Gladstone.”

Alix had to confess that she had not.

“Well, you’ll have heard of George Washington, then,” said Aunt Bella. “There he is, behind you.” And Alix turned round to look up at the austere face in powdered hair.

“He was an American, was he not, and your enemy?” she inquired.

“He was the enemy of one of our foolish kings,” said Aunt Bella, “but an Englishman, and one we are all proud of. And that’s Cobden.” She completed her educational round with the third large engraving that hung near the window.

“And now, perhaps,” said Giles, “you’ll like to hear what they all did and why Aunt Bella has them hanging here. By the time you do that you’ll have quite a good idea of modern English history.”

Alix for a moment was afraid that Aunt Bella might really be going to instruct her, and she had not the least wish to know anything about any of the respectable gentlemen who presided over the breakfast-table.

But Giles was going on, with his bantering smile. “If you go to Aunt Bella, you’ll get a one-sided impression, perhaps. She’s a great Liberal. We are all Liberals in my family. What you’d call Republicans.—Aunt Bella, you’re not asking this helpless French child to drink tea for her breakfast!”

“Doesn’t she have tea?” Aunt Bella asked, and though Alix insisted that she did not mind it at all, there was much concerned conversation, and the elderly maid was summoned and told to ask cook to make some cocoa for the young lady.

“You hate tea, I suppose,” said Giles, and Alix replied that she liked it very much at five o’clock, and Giles went on: “Whereas Aunt Bella likes it at all hours of the day and night; and Indian tea, I’m grieved to say; it’s the only rift within our lute, Aunt Bella’s Indian tea;—since we do agree about Gladstone. Now you’re a Royalist, I suppose, Alix?”

“But surely no rational person in France is a Royalist any longer,” said Aunt Bella.

“Grand-père did not love the Republic,” said Alix, “but Maman admires Napoleon and the Revolution.”

“I sometimes think we shall get both a revolution and a Napoleon in this country,” said Aunt Bella, “at the rate things seem to be going.”

“There’ll never be a revolution in England,” said Giles. “People who drink Indian tea could never make a revolution, could they, Alix?”

“I do not think so,” Alix smiled. “Nor in a country with such fogs.”

“That’s a good idea! Eh, Aunt Bella? People must see each other clearly in order to hate each other sufficiently.—What?”

“That is just it,” Alix nodded, laughing. “And you are all so kind. Kinder, I am sure, than we are.”

She and Giles understood each other. He treated her like a child, yet they understood each other, really, better than he and Aunt Bella, for she looked a little cautious when Giles embarked on his sallies, as if she did not quite know in what admission he might not involve her unless she were careful. She took things au pied de la lettre, Aunt Bella, as, after all, an elderly lady would do who sat down to breakfast every morning with such cold comfort on her walls as Messieurs Gladstone, Cobden, and Washington. A row of smiling Watteau engravings hung round Maman’s little dining-room in the rue de Penthièvre. Alix did not think that Gladstone, Cobden, or Washington would look with an eye of approval at Le Départ pour Cythère or the Assemblée Galante. Though Washington might. She liked him far the best of the three.

“And does your grandfather really expect to get the Bourbons back?” Aunt Bella inquired. “You are a Roman, I suppose, my dear child.”

“A Roman?” Alix, for all her English, was perplexed. “I have no Italian blood.”

“She means your church,” said Giles. “And Catholics, in France, do really all want back a king, don’t they?”

“I am a Catholic,” said Alix, “and so, of course, was Grand-père, and he certainly did not like the Republic. We had a very unscrupulous, intriguing mayor at Montarel and perhaps that was one reason. But I do not think that Grand-père expected anything any more or thought at all about kings.”

“A very strange people, the French,” Aunt Bella remarked, as if the fact were so patent that one of them, being present, could not object to its statement. “A very strange people, indeed. And where do you say your grandfather lives, my dear?”

“He is dead,” said Alix. “It was at Montarel he lived; near the Alps.”

“You may have noticed the water-colours of Avignon that I did some years ago, hanging in your bedroom,” said Aunt Bella. “Parts of France are very picturesque. But I prefer our scenery.”

“And now,” said Giles, looking at his watch, “we must be thinking about our train. Are you packed up, Alix?”

“Tell your mother,” said Aunt Bella, “that I expect her on Thursday for the two committees. She’ll spend the night, of course.” And when Alix’s box and bag had been brought and a taxi summoned, Aunt Bella said to her very kindly, as they stood for farewells in the hall: “You must come again and see me, my dear, when you are in London. I could take you to the National Gallery and Westminster Abbey, and, if you care about Social Work, you might be interested in my Infant Welfare Centre and Working Girls’ Gymnasium.”

“Is she an official, your aunt?” Alix inquired as she and Giles drove off to the station.

“An unofficial official,” Giles explained. “She runs more things than most officials. She sits on councils and governs hospitals and makes speeches. There can’t be a busier woman in London and she’s a splendid old girl;—though I do enjoy pulling her leg.” And then, since Alix was startled by this expression, also new to her, he had again to explain.

CHAPTER IV

The third-class carriage was not foul and wooden as it would have been in France, and they had it to themselves; but the cushions smelt of fog, and Alix thought she had never seen anything so ugly as the view from the window. It had been too dark to see the suburbs of London the night before, on the way up from Newhaven; but they lay all mean and low and toad-coloured this morning, wet under the lifted fog, and for as far as the eye could follow there was nothing to be seen but squatting roofs and gaunt factory chimneys.

“Bad, isn’t it?” said Giles. He sat opposite her, looking out with his face so young and so worn. She liked him so much and felt so safe with him, and yet it frightened her a little to look at him, just—strange association—as it had frightened her to look at Grand-père. Only Giles was kinder, far, than Grand-père. “But worse, do you think,” he went on, “than the suburbs of Paris?”

Alix did not quite like to say how much worse she thought it; it did not seem polite. “There, at least, one has the sky to look at,” she suggested. “It is happier, I think.”

“We’re not always in a fog, you know,” said Giles. “And Aunt Bella is very keen on Smoke Abatement. Perhaps we’ll look happier some day.”

“I am very glad your family does not live in London,” said Alix. She felt more shy of Giles this morning, shut up with him in the intimacy of the chill, smoky carriage, than she had last night in the station dining-room. And it was as if she felt him more shy, too. They were making talk a little.

“Wouldn’t you have come, if we’d lived in London?” he inquired.

“Maman would have sent me just the same, I think,” said Alix. “She wanted me to know England. And your family, specially, of course. Captain Owen always said I must know his family.”

“Oh, yes. Of course,” said Giles. He got up then and looked at the heat regulator and said it was cold, did she mind? There seemed no heat. Then he sat down again and fell into a silence, his arms folded, his long legs stretched as best they could, before him, and they both, again, looked out of the window.

On it went, the dreadful city; but at last furtive squares and triangles of green were stealing into it and sparsely placed trees edged streets that adventured forth, at random, it seemed, to end, almost with a stare of forlorn astonishment, in fields ravaged of every trace of beauty. But the green spread and widened like a kindly tide, and though the brick and slate was encrusted at intervals, like an eruption, upon the land, there were copses and rises of meditative meadow and the white sky was melting here and there to a timid blue above little hamlets that seemed to have a heart and to be breathing with a life of their own. Beside a brook a girl was strolling with scarf and stick, two joyous dogs racing ahead of her; a cock-pheasant ran, startled, through a wood sprinkled with gold and russet, and presently there was a deeper echo of the blue overhead in the blue of quiet hills on the horizon.

“This is better, isn’t it?” said Giles, bringing his eyes to her at last. “Don’t you call this pretty?”

“Very pretty,” said Alix. And it was pretty, though to her eyes it was also insignificant and confused, its lack of design or purpose teasing her mind with its contradiction of the instinct for order and shapeliness that dwelt there. “Is it because of the season and your mistiness that everything seems very near one? The horizon is so near, and even the sky comes quite close down.”

“Like nice, kind arms, I always think,” said Giles. “No, even in the Lake Country, even in Scotland, we don’t get your splendid distances; or very rarely.”

“But it is very pretty,” Alix repeated. “I like the woods. Did you see the girl and the dogs a little while ago? I imagine that your sisters look like that.”

“Our dogs look like that. Ruth and Rosemary aren’t quite so grown up. We have three dogs. Are you fond of them?”

“Oh, very fond; though I have never had a dog of my own. Maman thinks them too much trouble for a little appartement in Paris. But I had a cat at Montarel. A yellow cat with blue eyes. Have you ever seen one like that? He was so affectionate and intelligent and remembered me perfectly from year to year. He used to put his paws on my breast and rub against my face. The thought of seeing him again made it easier to bear leaving Maman when my half-year at Montarel came round.”

“Your half-year at Montarel?” Giles asked the question, but she saw that it was after a hesitation. She wondered how much Captain Owen had told them. She felt suddenly that she wanted to tell Giles everything there was to tell.

“I spent half the year with Grand-père at Montarel and half with Maman in Paris. Did you not know?” she said, looking him in the eyes. “My father and mother were parted. They were divorced. But it could not have been more Maman’s error since the judge allowed her to have me for half the time. It is arranged like that, you know, as fairer. And since my father died when I was hardly more than a baby, it was Grand-père who had me for that side of the family.—I tell it to you as I imagine it to have been, for Maman has never spoken to me of it.”

Giles was making it easy. He was looking at her with no sign of discomfort, looking, indeed, as if he knew it already. “Oh, yes,” he said. And then he added: “And when your grandfather died? Was there no one else on his side of the family? Don’t you go to Montarel any more?”

“No one at all,” said Alix, shaking her head. “I am the last of the Mouverays. That was why the château was sold and why Maman has me now entirely. But though it was sad to lose my grandfather, I love my mother best of course.”

“I hope you won’t miss her too much,” said Giles after a moment and in a kind voice. “We’ll try to give you a happy life, you know.”

“I am sure you will. But one must always miss one’s mother and one’s country. And then I always wonder if she is happy. Though I am only a child, she depends on me.”

“You have the comfort of knowing that Paris is only a few hours away,” said Giles, smiling.

“Ah, but Cannes isn’t. She is to be at Cannes this winter.”

“Oh, yes, I remember. She spends the winters at Cannes.”

“She enjoys her life there. She plays tennis beautifully and has so many friends, as perhaps Captain Owen told you. But I know that she misses me. I have always been with her there before. I was with her, you know, when Captain Owen met us.”

“I should rather say I did know,” said Giles. “We heard all about your kindness to him, you may be sure. You may be sure we are a very grateful family.” Giles spoke with heartiness, and though she felt something a little forced in it there was nothing forced in his evident kindness towards herself. They were talking happily. As they had talked last night at dinner.

“And you may be sure we heard all about you,” said Alix, smiling across at him. “All about Ruth and Rosemary and Francis and Jack. What a large family you are. It must be very happy being so many.”

“I say!” laughed Giles, “you have a good memory! To get us in our order, too.”

“But how could I forget when he told us so much! We saw all your photographs so often. Only one does not get so clear an idea from photographs. I would not have known you from yours. And there was Toppie. After your mother, he talked most of all about Toppie. I shall see her, too, shall I not?”

It was as if she had struck him. The violent red that mounted to his face was echoed in Alix’s cheeks. It was as if, with her innocent words, she had struck him, and in the silence that followed them, while he gazed at her, and she, helplessly, gazed back, she saw that what had underlain the confusion of yesterday had simply been suffering. She had laid it bare. She was looking at it now.

He tried to master it; to conceal it; in a moment he stammered: “Oh, he talked most about Toppie, did he?”

“Was she not his betrothed?” asked Alix in a feeble voice. She felt exhausted. He had struck her, too.

“Of course she was,” said Giles, and his eyes now lifted from her face and fixed themselves over her head on Maman’s dressing-case.

“And—is she not still living?”

“Toppie? Living?” His eyes came back to her. “I should rather say so. You see,” he went on at once, though Alix could not see the relevance, “she was so horribly cut up by his death.”

“Of course,” Alix murmured. “I am so sorry. I should not have spoken of him at all, when you have lost him. I did not mean to be stupid; unfeeling.”

“But, good Heavens! you’re not stupid! Not a bit unfeeling!” cried Giles, and seeing her distress, his eyes actually filled with tears. “It’s not Owen at all. We often speak of him. It’s Toppie. And it’s I who am such a dunderhead. You see, she’s all that’s left of him. I mean, all that’s loveliest; most sacred. She cared for him so much. She’s like something in a shrine, to us all.”

“Yes. Yes. I see. I understand,” said Alix; though, still, she could not see. “I spoke lightly. I do not forgive myself.”

“But it’s nothing to do with you,” Giles almost shouted as he had shouted at her last night. “I always get like that when she’s talked about, with him. You poor, dear child, it’s nothing on earth to do with you. It’s absolutely my stupidity,” Giles assured her, their suffusion giving his eyes a strange heaviness.

It must be left at that. There was nothing for her to say. He was suffering and he tried to conceal from her how much; but she had seen it too plainly. All unwittingly she had blundered, blundered horribly, in speaking of Captain Owen and his betrothed, and a sense of depression, dark, like the London fog, penetrating and bitter like the London smoke, settled upon her.

“Here’s the station! There’s Mummy!” cried Giles. They had sat silent, and now he sprang up as if with great gaiety. He was doing his best. He was trying to make her forget; it was a little stupid of him if he thought he could succeed, Alix felt; but she summoned a responsive smile with which to greet Giles’s mother.

She recognized her at once as the train slid into the little station. She stood there, tall and slender, wistful and intent, with her spare grey skirt and black hat and scarf, and hair straying about her ears, as shy, as gentle as a girl. In her photograph, seen at Cannes, it had seemed incredible that she should be Captain Owen’s mother, and though her face showed as faded and worn in the morning light, it was even more incredibly young. She must be fifty, yet Maman, unflawed and radiant in her thirty-seven summers, had a greater maturity of aspect. “She is so innocent,” thought Alix; not clearly seeing, yet deeply feeling the meaning of the word.

She was walking beside the train, smiling up at them, her hand laid on the window of their carriage, and Giles did not wait for it to stop before he sprang out beside her and kissed her, doffing his cap. There was no confusion, no trouble, in the eyes of Giles’s mother; they had nothing to hide; this was the next thought that came to Alix; they were only shy and sweet and sad. She did not speak at first. She took Alix by the hand and stood so holding her while Giles got out the dressing-case, and then led her along beside them, glancing down at her as they went; and Alix saw that with all the memories her own presence recalled, words were too difficult.

Giles was telling of the Victoria disaster. “I missed that first train, Mummy. I didn’t get to Victoria till nearly two hours after hers had come in. But she’s forgiven us. She’s a most forgiving disposition,” said Giles, “I’ve discovered that. She won’t resent any of the wrongs we put upon her.”

“Two hours! How dreadful! Oh, how dreadful!” Mrs. Bradley was exclaiming, “What must you have thought of us, Alix!”

“But it wasn’t your wrong, at all,” said Alix; “it was Maman’s mistake. I think telegrams take very long now from France to England.”

“There always are mistakes about meetings,” said Mrs. Bradley. “Dreadful things always do seem to happen.—Shall I drive, Giles, dear? or sit behind with Alix so that we can talk? That will be best, I think.”

They drove over commons and along woodland roads. The air was white and chill yet dimly transfused with sunlight, and there was a smell of wet pine-trees and wet withered heather. Alix’s spirits lifted a little with the scent and swiftness, and they lifted still further, seeming, like the sky, to show a rift of blue, when in her gentle, slightly hoarse voice, Mrs. Bradley said: “Is your mother well, dear? How did you leave her?” This was the first inquiry about Maman she had heard, the first interest she had seen displayed. Giles, she remembered it now, had volunteered not a remark or question.

“She wrote so kindly,” said Mrs. Bradley. “She understood, I know, how much we hoped to see you here, how much pleasure it would give us. I wish she could have come, too. Owen so often wrote about you both, from Cannes. He said you made him think of Jeanne d’Arc, and your mother of Madame Récamier.—I’m glad you still do your hair like that,” said Mrs. Bradley, smiling shyly, and Alix saw that she had forgotten nothing and that all the links that Giles had ignored were cherished by her.

There were links, however, that she would not see. That must be, Alix reflected, what she had felt as her innocence. The pleasure that her coming might give to the Bradleys had never been part of Maman’s motive. She had taken it for granted, but it had not counted. Maman had sent her because she had conceived of the winter in England as an advantage for her child and because—Alix saw further into these motives than Maman intended her to do—it had not been convenient to take her to Cannes. But there were few of Maman’s motives, Alix felt, as she listened to the gentle, hesitating voice, that Mrs. Bradley would divine. Perhaps it was that that made Maman seem so much the older. Yet Maman, too, might have blindnesses. She would have been blind, for instance, in saying of Mrs. Bradley—and Alix could hear her saying it: “Un peu bê-bête, n’est-ce pas, ma chérie?” Mrs. Bradley was simple, very simple; but she was not bête. Alix felt that she understood Mrs. Bradley as Maman would not understand her, and it was perhaps because of this that Mrs. Bradley spoke presently about her dead son, for to any one who did not understand her she could not have spoken. She would never be bête about things like that. She was longing to speak about him, Alix saw; to ask questions, to reënforce her store of precious memories by such fragments as the little French girl could offer her. Alix told her of their walks above the sea at Cannes, of the concerts he had so loved, and of how much he had had to tell and teach them of flowers and birds.

“Oh, yes, the birds; he loved them,” said Mrs. Bradley, turning away her eyes that were full of tears. She was like this November day, with its suffused sunlight, and fresh, sad fragrance; there were no tocsins or trumpets in her blood, either; yet all the same she knew what suffering was as well as Maman. The hoarseness of her voice had come, perhaps, in part from crying; something scared, that one caught in her glance at moments, had not been there, Alix felt sure, before the war; before the news of her son’s death had been brought to her. And as Alix thought of Captain Owen’s death and of what his mother must have felt, there rose in her memory a picture of a Spring morning in Paris, the wild, wet day, with shafts of sunlight slanting through the rain and striking great spaces on the pavements to azure. She had been standing at the window of their salon, looking at the rain and sunlight, and at the flower-woman on the corner opposite, her basket heaped with pink and white tulips, and she had heard Maman, suddenly, behind her, saying, as if she had forgotten that Alix was there: “Dieu!—Dieu!—Dieu!” And, looking round she had seen her with the letter in her lap and had read the catastrophe in her white face and horror-filled eyes. So many of their friends had fallen in the war, but for none of them had Maman mourned as she had for Captain Owen.

The car turned, now, with careful swiftness, into an entrance gate which opened against a well-clipped hedge. A curve among the trees brought them to the front of a large house, red brick below, gables above, with beams and plaster. A great many gables, a great many creepers, large windows open to the air. A kind, capacious house, promising comfort; but how ugly, thought Alix, as they alighted; “Combien peu intéressante.” It was difficult to believe that from its cosy portals Captain Owen and Giles had gone forth to tragedy.

Two girls, at the sound of the car, had burst out upon the steps, and three dogs; an Irish terrier, a fox terrier, and a West Highland terrier;—“I like him best”—thought Alix of the last;—and they bounded in the air while the girls shouted:

“I say, Giles, you did serve us a turn last night! Your wire never got here until this morning! We sat up till eleven!”

They wore knitted jumpers and had corn-coloured hair and pink faces. They were delighted to see their brother back after his misadventures; the dogs were delighted to see him; only the dogs did not shout, which was an advantage. Alix had never heard such a noise.

“And here is Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, who had stopped to take the appealing fox terrier in her arms; the fox terrier was a lady, no longer young, and the uproar affected her too much; Mrs. Bradley soothed and reassured her.

Ruth and Rosemary, as though aware for the first time of Alix’s presence, turned their attention to her and cried “Hello” heartily, while they shook her by the hand. They were like Aunt Bella in their rosiness, robustness, their air of doing things all the time with absorption and energy; and like Aunt Bella and the house they were “peu intéressantes.”

“Did you have a good crossing? Are you a good sailor?” asked Rosemary; while Ruth said: “Let me carry up her bag.—Do you play hockey?—Jouissez-vous le hockey?”

“She speaks English better than you do,” said Giles, pulling his sister’s rope of hair; “and your French is a disgrace to your family.”

They all went into a hall that had wide windows in unexpected places and an important oak staircase winding up from it, also in an unexpected place. Alix was dimly aware of earnest, cheerful attempts at originality in its design; but the originality did not go beyond the windows and staircases, the high wainscotting and oaken pillars. Everything else, from the brasses of the big chimney-place to the florid crétonnes on the window-seats, followed a bright household formula. The brightness would have been a little oppressive had it not lapsed to a benign shabbiness, and the two good-tempered maids who followed with Alix’s box belonged to it all, ornamental in their crisp pink print dresses, yet a little dishevelled; their caps perched far back on large protuberances of hair and fashionable whiskers of curl coming forward on their cheeks.

Alix felt all sorts of things about the hall and about the crétonnes and about the maids as Ruth and Rosemary and the dogs hustled her along. What it amounted to she did not clearly know, except that Giles did not really go with the hall, while his sisters did, and that Mrs. Bradley did not like the caps and the whiskers, but that she would always sacrifice her own tastes—hardly aware that she had them—to other people’s cheerfulness.

“Oh, well, of course you play tennis,” Ruth was saying. “Everybody plays tennis. But you must learn hockey at once. It’s the great game at our school and you’re nowhere unless you play it.—Down Bobby, down! He’s made friends with you already.—The mud will come off all right.—One can’t mind mud if one has dogs, can one? Down, you silly duffer!”

“Never mind. Let him jump. I am fond of dogs,” said Alix, patting the ardent head of the Irish terrier. “What is the name of the little, low, white one? He is quieter, but I think he likes me too.”

“His name is Jock, and Mummy’s fox terrier is Amy. Oh, they’ll all like you, all right; they’re as friendly as possible—though Amy can be a bit peevish at moments; Mummy spoils her.—Here’s your room,” said Rosemary, ushering her in. “It’s a jolly room, isn’t it? Mummy thought you’d like the one with the view best. The other spare-room looks over the kitchen-garden. It’s a jolly view, isn’t it? One doesn’t often get a view like that. Put the box here, Edie.—Oh, the bathroom is on the landing, that door, you see. We have our baths in the morning and the water doesn’t run very hot for more than two. So will you have yours at night? Mummy does. Ruth and I like it best in the morning, and Giles doesn’t mind if his is cold.—French people don’t care about baths, anyway, do they?—Lunch will be ready in twenty minutes. Can you find your way down?” Rosemary added rapidly, her eye on the staircase where Giles was descending, “I want to speak to Giles.”

“No, you don’t! It’s my place to tell him first!” screamed Ruth.

“It’s about the football, Giles!”

“Oh, shut up!” shouted Giles affectionately. “What a frightful row you’re making!”

And Alix at last heard them all hurtling down the stairs together.

Jock, who was old and a little melancholy, remained with her, seating himself on the hearth rug and surveying her with kindly but disenchanted eyes.

“Dieu! Quel bruit!” Alix addressed him. She felt that Jock agreed with her about the noise and in finding Ruth and Rosemary, as well as Bobby, too turbulent. She listened at the door to be sure that they were safely gone. Then she tiptoed softly down and peeped in at the bathroom. It was large and untidy. She, too, preferred her bath hot and in the morning. Ruth and Rosemary were kind, but your preferences would never stand in the way of theirs. No, never would she find them interesting. But they did not ask it of you, Alix reflected, going back to her room. All they asked of you was to let them bathe at the time that best pleased them, play hockey with them, and admire their view. She went to look at the view. A pleasant, heathery common dipping at its further edge to a birch-wood. That was all. And another gabled roof rose among pines on a near hillside. All comfort; no beauty, thought Alix, and the sky came so closely down that it made her feel suffocated. And as she leaned looking out she thought of the roll of the mighty Juras, and the plain, and the river shining across it. How tame this was, a piping, perching little bird beside an eagle of great flights and soarings. Why had Maman sent her here? She could never be happy; never, never, under this low sky, among these noisy girls. And wave after wave there mounted in her an old, well-remembered homesickness for Maman and a new homesickness for France.

CHAPTER V

She was not to escape Ruth and Rosemary for long. Already, at lunch, she felt that Giles, talking gravely with his mother of treaties and leagues and such dull matters, seemed to have relegated her to their category. Over the dining-room mantelpiece hung a portrait of the late Mr. Bradley; she knew it must be he from his likeness to Aunt Bella and Ruth and Rosemary, and Alix felt sure, as she looked up at his pink and yellow, his tweeds and watch-chain and good, shrewd eyes, that Mrs. Bradley’s sons must always have interested her more than their father. But she would never have known this, just as she did not know, nor did they, that she was fonder of her boys than of Ruth and Rosemary. “But I believe that in this country everybody is fonder of sons,” thought Alix, marvelling at the reappearance of the strange cabbage cut into squares and recalling impressions of English literature where, despite romantic surfaces, it was apparent to the discerning eye that men always counted for more than women.

Mrs. Bradley carved. It was a well-roasted leg of mutton, that made Alix think of the mutton in “Alice.” The potatoes, too, were roasted and the entremets a bread-and-butter pudding. Mr. Bradley had been nourished on such meals. They would produce Mr. Bradleys.

“Now we will show you everything,” said Ruth when luncheon was over. The implication seemed to be that a specially fortunate experience was in store for her. A fond complacency breathed from both girls. “And it is natural that one should love one’s home,” thought Alix, the tolerance of her comprehension giving her childish face a maturity beyond its years.

So she was led from the lawn to the shrubberies; shown the summer-house where in summer they had tea and the herbaceous border, neatly disposed for its winter sleep. The kitchen-garden was displayed, and at its far end they passed through a door to a little path, bordered by gorse-bushes, that ran beneath the garden-wall and then turned aside over the common. It was a sheltered, solitary little path, the branches of the garden fruit-trees hanging over it, and Alix felt that it might often be a refuge for her. It was a pretty path and had a character of its own. To Ruth and Rosemary its meaning lay in leading somewhere else, and they crossed the common and rambled in the birch-wood, inciting each other to long jumps over a sluggish little stream, half ditch, half brook, that flowed through it, and encouraging the dogs with loud cries to chase the scurrying rabbits on the further hillside.

“There’s the jolliest walk along the top,” said Ruth, “among the junipers. But perhaps you are tired. French girls aren’t much good at walking, are they?”

“I walk a good deal in the country,” said Alix, “but I think I will unpack my box now.”

“Edie will have unpacked it for you,” said Ruth, “so we’ll go on; only say if you are tired. You wear sensible shoes, I must say. I thought all French girls pinched their toes.”

So they continued to walk, talking as they went, asking her for none of her information, only imparting theirs, as if it must, self-evidently, have superior value. Alix heard them with interest when they told of Giles and of his scholastic feats at Oxford, feats interrupted by his departure for the war, but now to be resumed. Philosophy was Giles’s special branch, and they told her that he was going to teach philosophy, at Oxford probably, and write it some day.

“Tiens!” said Alix, relapsing, as was her wont when surprised, into French. She knew nothing of philosophers and the word only conjured up a picture of someone aged and bearded who drank hemlock.

“Yes,” said Ruth, accepting the ejaculation as a tribute, “he’ll be a great man, all right, Giles.”

And Alix also learned that Ruth and Rosemary both intended following professional careers and that their father had come from the north and had built Heathside and that their mother was a Londoner and that her father had been the editor of an important London paper. “What! Never heard of ‘The Liberal’!” Ruth exclaimed. Ruth, as eldest, did most of the talking, subjected to frequent interruptions from Rosemary. “I should have thought even French people would have heard of ‘The Liberal.’ Oh, yes, he was a great swell, our grandfather.”

Alix did not think she would have found him so. France, she saw, mainly existed for Ruth and Rosemary as a place where one’s brothers had gone to fight and one’s friends to nurse.

“And what is the pleasant house?” she inquired of them, when, after their walk along the hilltop, they had crossed the wood and emerged again upon the common.

It stood, with an air of serenity and detachment, half a mile away, a tall house of pale, eighteenth-century brick with a white door and white window-sills, a formal garden before it and a neat hedge dividing it from the road. One felt that the woods had grown up around it and that it preserved a tranquil personality of its own, unmoved by the haphazard accretions of a century.

“Oh, that’s the Rectory; where Toppie lives,” said Ruth. “You can see the church spire just above the trees to the right. Pleasant, do you call it? I think it’s rather dismal; so bare and square. It needs lots of creepers and shrubberies to make it cheerful; but old Mr. Westmacott doesn’t like them.”

“Creepers would not be in the character of that house, I feel,” said Alix; “and they would hide the pretty colour of the brick. There are a few roses, too, are there not?”

“Yes; a few. Toppie would have her roses. I hate a house without creepers.”

“Shall I soon see Toppie, do you think?”

“Oh, you’ll see her soon, all right,” said Ruth. “She’ll be coming in to tea to-day, probably.”

“I know she’s coming,” said Rosemary. “She asked me yesterday if Alix would be here, and when I told her we’d had the wire, she said she’d come. I think she’s rather keen on seeing you, Alix. Owen wrote a lot about you, you see.”

They spoke without any emotion of Toppie. They took her for granted. She was not, to them, a shrine. But even before the scene in the train with Giles, Alix had had a special feeling about Toppie herself, and as she walked on with the chattering girls her mind went back to the day at Cannes when Captain Owen had first showed her and Maman Toppie’s photograph. He carried the little leather case in his breast-pocket, his mother’s picture on one side and hers on the other, and Maman had said, as she took the case from him and looked: “Elle est tout-à-fait ravissante.”

“You don’t see very much of her in that,” said Captain Owen, wagging his foot a little, and Alix guessed that he was moved in speaking of his fiancée. “But it does show something. Lovely the shape of her face, isn’t it? She’s not exactly beautiful.”

“Oh! ‘exactly’! Who would care to be ‘exactly’ beautiful!” said Maman.

He had told them that Miss Westmacott—Toppie’s real name was Enid Westmacott—had come with her father to live near them when she was only fifteen. Mr. Westmacott was the Rector of their parish and he had to explain to them—for Maman said that with all her English she could never get it quite clear—what rectors were and how they came to have daughters; and when Maman said, as though rectors must make up for having daughters by having devout ones, “Elle est très dévote?” Captain Owen, with his charming smile, rejoined, “Oh, much better than that!”

Later on, when they were alone, Maman had remarked to her: “She is pretty; but nothing more. Elle est nulle, cette Toppie; très, très nulle.” But Alix had not agreed. Often she did not agree with Maman. The little photograph had not said much, but it had said something definite. “She is like someone in a tower.” So she tried to fix her feeling.

“Even in a tower one may oneself be insignificant,” said Maman, and to this Alix had replied: “Not if one is the tower oneself.”

Toppie was there when they got in. A fire had been lighted for tea in the drawing-room, a long room with roses on the chairs and sofas and a high wainscotting of dark woodwork, and above that blue paper with old-fashioned crayon portraits and large photographs from famous pictures. A tall grey figure stood at the further end, and Alix knew at once that it was Toppie who turned her head to look at her like that. She was helping Mrs. Bradley arrange flowers, Michaelmas daisies, oak leaves, and sprays of golden larch. She held a large bronze vase and wore a grey tweed skirt and a grey woollen jumper and grey shoes strapping across the instep with a buckle. Her hair was as fair as primroses and was ruffled up a little above the black ribbon that bound it.

“This is Alix, Toppie, dear,” said Mrs. Bradley in a gentle voice, and she came forward and passed her arm in Toppie’s as if she knew that it must mean something very special to her to see the little French girl.

“I’m so glad,” said Toppie. She gazed at Alix for a long moment, as though forgetting that she held the vase; then, looking round her, vague in her absorption, she set it down on a table and held out her hand.

The water from the vase had spilled over it, and as it closed on Alix’s it made her think of the hand of a dryad, a naiad, or some chill, unearthly creature. “Yes; in towers,” she thought, as Toppie’s eyes dwelt on her. “And how much she loved him!”

She saw then that Giles was there. He was stretched out in a deep chair on one side of the fire, his hands clasped behind his head, and he was watching Toppie; her meeting with Toppie.

“And how much Giles loves her!” came the further thought, sharp with its sense of sudden elucidation. If he sat there, in that rather mannerless fashion, not helping with the water-cans, the baskets of flowers, the scissors, it was because he loved her and wanted to watch her.

Toppie, still with her absorption, had picked up the vase again and carried it to a far table.

“There; that’s the best we can do with the garden just now,” said Mrs. Bradley, smiling at her. “And without you, Toppie, I’d never have made the effort. Toppie thinks a room without flowers so sad. She made me come out with her and pick all these. It’s astonishing, really, what one can still find in a November garden.”

“They look awfully nice,” said Giles.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” said Ruth—Alix had already noted of her that, on all occasions, she gave her opinion without being asked—“they look to me rather dingy and frost-bitten. Rather a waste of time, I think, all this messing about to arrange flowers that don’t exist!”—and Ruth laughed, pleased with her own good sense, and went to seat herself on the arm of Giles’s chair.

“She bores him; but he would not like to say it,” thought Alix, seeing Giles’s kind but unwelcoming look. She had a feeling of excitement, yet of oppression. Toppie, she knew, was thinking of nothing but her.

The tea-table stood before the sofa on the other side of the fire from Giles, and Mrs. Bradley sat down to it and Toppie came beside her, and then, looking up at Alix, laying her hand on the place still vacant, said “Come here, Alix.”

“There’s room for me, too,” cried Rosemary, plunging down between them. “My place is always near the cake!”

But Toppie looked at her quite coldly and said: “There’s not room for you, Rosemary. Somewhere else, please. You make us all uncomfortable.”

She was very fair, with a skin that would have been of a milky whiteness had it not been thickly freckled. Her lips were small and pale, her chin long and narrow; all her head, bound round with the black ribbon, was singularly narrow, and that, perhaps, was why her grey eyes seemed to look out from towers. “And how she has suffered!” thought Alix.

Nights; how many nights of sleepless suffering had not Toppie known. The tears had run down as she had lain in the long darknesses, remembering; always remembering, seeing his face before her always. Tears; vigils; remembrance;—all were in Toppie’s eyes. “Oh, no, Maman; not nulle; anything but nulle,” Alix thought, while, with a great wave of depression, the meaning of the war, of all its lonely suffering, swept over her. Was Captain Owen worth so much suffering? His personality lived most for Alix in the memory of his smile and his worth seemed to live in that, too. He had been charming; and there was worth in charm.

Tea was made and they were all talking of the things they did and the people they did them with. Alix heard of a Women’s Institute, of Boy Scouts and Girl Guides, and a village Choral Society that Mrs. Bradley conducted. Giles sang in it, and the girls and Jack and Francis when they were at home. “And you must sing with us, Alix,” said Mrs. Bradley, and they asked her about her piano lessons and the singing at the Lycée, and she had to confess that she had never heard “The Messiah,” at which there was a shout of good-natured protest from Ruth and Rosemary. “But you’re not a musical nation, are you?” said Ruth; and disposed of France as a musical nation.

The talk made Alix think of the thick slices of bread-and-butter that Ruth and Rosemary and Giles were eating, it was so kindly and useful. Very different from the talk to which she was accustomed in Maman’s salon; and Maman’s salon itself was as different from this as the talk. It was small, yet it was stately. She and Maman had done their best for the “petit trou” of an appartement in the rue de Penthièvre, and Maman’s russet head, as she sat with her cigarette at the tea-table, had melted and shone against the old tapestry, grey and green and citron, and her lovely face had seemed to belong to the Empire sconces and the carnations in their tall crystal vases that made light constellations on the mantelpiece. Maman’s salon, though stately, was dense and rich and sweet, and the talk that passed, soft and shining, was like a beautiful, iridescent soap-bubble tossed so lightly from one to the other; from monsieur de Villanelle, with his pointed red beard and sad blue eyes and long Flemish nose like a Memling saint; to mademoiselle Blanche Fontaine; and from her to monsieur de Maubert, with his Jovian head; and from him to monsieur Jules, dark and gloomy, who sometimes let it drop in his abstraction, unless Maman gave it a little puff that carried it on to madame Gérardin, who received it with shrill little outcries, prettily playing with it—Alix had to own that she played prettily with talk—until it was safely back in Maman’s hands again. And then another was blown. How Maman smiled; how she lifted gay yet sombre brows; how lovely they all thought her. And though one might see talk so light only as a soap-bubble, Alix dimly apprehended that it was fertile, creative; that it spread, like a sweet fragrance; that it floated like a winged seed on the breeze, out from Maman’s salon to permeate, alter the world. It made a difference to the world what monsieur Villanelle thought about the last book and poem; what monsieur Jules thought about the last painter, mademoiselle Blanche about the last play, and monsieur de Maubert about the latest feat of Léon Daudet or Charles Maurras. And since, to all of them, it was in Maman’s reception of their ideas that the final verdict lay, Maman, to the world at large, made the greatest difference of all.

“You’ll see what a jolly life you’ll have here, my dear kid,” Rosemary remarked to her; Rosemary, undismayed by her rebuff, had worked through the bread-and-butter and was now eating quantities of cake. She was only six months older than Alix, but she assumed protecting airs towards her. “Girls in France have a beastly mewed-up time, haven’t they?”

“Have you been much in France?” Alix asked her. She felt no call to combat Rosemary’s conceptions. She was, indeed, completely indifferent to what they might be. She asked her question from mere politeness.

“Not much; but Ruth and I stayed with a French family once. My word! they were quaint! They thought the Bible improper reading for jeunes filles and picked their teeth at the table and I don’t believe they ever took a bath. They almost had apoplexy when we said we had to have one every day; thought it would be sure to give us des rhumatismes.”

“Many of us are quite clean,” Alix remarked, and at this Giles laughed loudly.

“There’s one for you, you young savage,” he commented, whereupon Rosemary bounded at him and grappled with his hair.

“Help, Ruth! He’s choking me!” she screamed, and Alix, with some astonishment, watched the uncouth game that followed, Giles throwing off his sisters alternately until they tumbled on the floor and sat, dishevelled and delighted, getting their breath and smoothing back their loosened hair.

“Not quite so much noise, dears,” Mrs. Bradley remarked once or twice, but she continued calmly to converse with Toppie who glanced at the mêlée, Alix thought, with a remote, repudiating eye, while she said: “I find him a thoroughly bad boy. There’s something fundamentally wrong with him.”

“Oh, poor little fellow!” Mrs. Bradley sighed. “His home and heredity are great handicaps, aren’t they?”

“I don’t see why they should be,” said Toppie. “Mrs. Brown is a patient hard-working woman and, though the father drinks, I don’t think he is dishonest. Whereas Percy is a sneak and a liar. He does mean things and then is too much of a coward to confess them.”

It was strange, thought Alix, listening, though not in the least interested in Percy Brown’s heredity, that with a face so sweet Toppie should have so cold a voice. She would be sorry for Percy Brown, she felt sure, if she were to see him confronting Toppie.

“It’s very difficult to confess when one has done a mean thing,” Mrs. Bradley mused—and Alix almost had to laugh at hearing her, so impossible was it to imagine Mrs. Bradley involved in such a dilemma. “The cowardice and the meanness go together, don’t they, and Percy is so young that they are not worse, really, than weakness and timidity. He may outgrow it.”

“I don’t think he will. I think he is fundamentally bad,” said Toppie, but now with more sadness than severity, and, turning to Alix she said: “Will you come and have tea with me to-morrow? We could have a little walk first, and then you could come back to tea with me and my father.”

“But she’s going to school with us, Toppie! We have to teach her hockey!” cried Ruth.

“Not to-morrow. She need not begin till Monday, need you, Alix?” Alix thought not, and though Ruth declared, “You can’t begin a day too soon for hockey,” Alix and Toppie had decided the question between them.

CHAPTER VI

“Tell me everything; everything you remember,” said Toppie. She was striding along over the heather, a grey woollen scarf tossed over her shoulder, a knitted cap drawn down closely over her ears, and she made Alix feel shy. She had seen that Toppie liked her and she had foreseen that she would question her. But as she felt the pressure of her longing she knew how little she could satisfy it.

“I think I remember him best of all as I first saw him,” she said, searching her thoughts.

“Yes. As you first saw him. Tell me about it. How did you first see him? He wrote to me, often, from Cannes; so much about your mother; so much about you. He said you were the dearest little girl. I understand why he said it—if you don’t mind my saying so.—But he couldn’t tell me what I most wanted to know, could he? How he himself looked to you.—What he said to you.—How he seemed.—You understand, I know, though you are so young, how one longs for everything that remains on earth of anyone one loves. People’s memories; they are precious. You understand that,” said Toppie. And Alix felt that only by the pressure of her longing was she thus lifted above her natural reticence. The very words she used were not habitual to her; she would have been shy of using such words ordinarily.

“Yes; I understand,” said Alix. “We saw him first on the great road that runs above the sea. Maman and I were going up and he was coming down, so that we saw him tall against the sky; limping a little as he came. He looked at us, and we looked at him;—it is almost as if one recognized the people who are destined to be our friends, is it not, Mademoiselle?—and when we had passed, I looked back at him and he was looking round at us. It had been a mutual impression. We talked of it afterwards. We saw him against the sky and he saw us against the sea; as if we had risen from it, like people in a fairy-tale, he told us; and Maman laughed and said that people didn’t rise from the sea carrying parasols. I remember so well the expression of his eyes”—Alix felt still shyer, but she forced herself through the shyness—“gay and searching like a dog’s; out-of-door eyes. He had field-glasses in his hand. And that very evening, at the Casino, a friend of Maman’s brought him and introduced him to her. So it all began.”

“Tall against the sky. Out-of-door eyes. Yes, I can see him.—Don’t call me mademoiselle, Alix; call me Toppie.—And with his bird-glasses. He would have been watching birds. I see it all,” said Toppie, her eyes before her. “And then?”

“Then he came to see us every day. It was of birds we talked on the first day that he and I and Maman went for a walk. I knew them a little; not their names; but their songs and their habits, from having been so much in the country; whereas Maman is so much the parisienne that she was very ignorant and she laughed at us and said they were all much alike; small, grey silhouettes in the leaves. And he used to say that I was like a black-cap and she like a nightingale; though we did not see those birds at Cannes.”

“And then?” Toppie repeated as Alix paused.

“He was still very lame,” said Alix, “so that he could not play tennis, but he used to come with us and watch Maman play; she is one of the finest players at Cannes; did he tell you? It is beautiful to watch her; she is perhaps at her best when playing tennis. And he used to write his letters in the garden of our little villa;—it was lent us, that Autumn, by friends; a charming little place; he will have told you of it. He must often have written you letters from the garden. And he and Maman sat there and read. He would read to her and she would correct his French, and she would read to him so that his ear might become accustomed to the correct accent. And sometimes it was I who read while he held, I remember, a skein of silk on his hands for Maman to wind to balls; lemon-coloured silk for a little jacket she was knitting me. She is so clever with her fingers.”

“Oh, she was so good to him! I know!” Toppie exclaimed, her eyes still fixed on the distance. “I don’t know what he would have done with himself if it hadn’t been for her kindness. He had been so frightfully lonely there at Cannes. He found it such a dismal place until you came; perhaps because it is supposed to be so gay; and that, in war-time, must have been dreadful. No shade, I remember he said; only sun and shadows.”

“Yes; I remember that he found so much sun depressing, and that seemed very strange to us, for we so love the sun. But there was real shade in our garden under the trees. The fuchsias, too, were in bloom everywhere, I remember, and I associate them so much with him; gay, delicate flowers.”

“Fuchsias?” said Toppie. “But that’s a soulless flower. How strange that he should have been associated with them in anyone’s mind.—Fuchsias”—she seemed to be forcing herself to see them, too. “They grow so much in the Riviera, of course. But I always think of Owen with daffodils. Our woods are full of them here in Spring. Fuchsias. Yes? What else? You all laughed together? Your mother is so gay. He was happy?”

“Very happy, I think. We all laughed a great deal. Maman is not what one would call a gay person; but she can make gaiety. He teased me a great deal. I have never cared for dolls and he teased me about them. He said a girl must be made to care about dolls, and he bought dreadful little ones with small feet in painted boots and hid them in my napkin at dinner or even under my pillow, where I found them at night. I used to fling them at him—rush down to the salon where he and Maman sat, and fling them at him.—For I was already fifteen, and at that age one is not supposed to care about dolls, in any case. We had great games, it was a happy time, in spite of all the sadness. He was a happy person.”

“Happy. Yes. A happy person,” Toppie repeated. She turned her strange shining eyes on Alix. “He is happy now. He is here, you know. We are not parted. I feel him every day; always; near me. His happiness shines round me.”

Alix was struck to dumbness. She felt afraid. Such thoughts were so alien to her that she even wondered if Toppie were quite sane.

Toppie went on. “You believe that, too, in your church, don’t you?—that the dead are near us; not far away; not shut into a hard golden heaven we can’t reach; but quite near and caring.”

“We have purgatory. I do not understand all these doctrines. But I am not dévote,” said Alix after a moment.

“Purgatory? That’s only a name. That’s only a symbol, like the golden heaven. And those who have died, giving their lives for us, will not have to pass through such an intermediary state.—You are too young. You have never lost anyone you loved.”

“No one except my poor grandfather. I always pray for the repose of his soul. That is what we do in my church. Is it different in yours? And if they are reposing, how can they be near us?” Indeed, the thought of Grand-père as near, in his new, unimaginable state, was even more disquieting than Toppie herself.

Toppie seemed to feel that she had drawn her young companion beyond her depth. She was silent for a moment, gathering back her thoughts from their search for sympathy, and she asked, then: “Why do you say your poor grandfather? Was he unhappy?”

“I am afraid he was. Very unhappy.”

“Oh, I am so sorry. You felt and shared it. I saw in your face at once, dear little Alix, that you had shared unhappiness.—You are so young; younger than your age in one way; yet in another you are so grown up; it is strange.” Toppie’s eyes mused on her for a moment. “Why was he unhappy?” she added gently. “Though, indeed, most people are.”

“He was ruined. He had lost everything,” said Alix. “Montarel, where the Mouverays have always lived, is sold now, and he knew before he died that it would be so. And he had lost everyone he loved, except me.”

“Your mother is not his daughter, then?”

“No; my father was his son; his only child.”

“But you and your mother were often with him?”

“Only I. He liked having me alone.” Alix did not require consideration to find an answer. To Giles, in the train, frankness had been possible; but it was difficult to repeat such frankness. And Toppie, Alix felt, was so different from Giles. She would not understand Maman being divorced as he had. So she evaded her question.

They had reached the Rectory now, and she was glad not only that they had passed away from Grand-père and his causes for unhappiness, but from Captain Owen, too. She would have been sorry to have had to answer questions about the Paris days when so much of the brightness had dropped from him. Her memories of Captain Owen in Paris were all tinged with sadness; perhaps because the war was so much nearer in Paris and Captain Owen’s return to it so imminent. It was as if, in seeing him there with them for his short leaves, they had seen death always beside him.

“I hope you will be here when our roses are out,” said Toppie, in the Rectory garden. “Father and I are proud of our roses.”

Alix counted on being back with Maman long before the time of roses, but she said that she hoped so, too, and as they passed a window she caught a glimpse of a tall, bleached man sitting at a writing-table, very erect, austere, and absorbed; like an old eighteenth-century print of d’Alembert, Diderot, or some such erudite wigged gentleman.

“Yes; it’s my father,” said Toppie. “You’ll see him directly; at tea.”

Alix stood still for a moment as they entered the drawing-room. It had everything of charm that the Bradleys’ drawing-room lacked, except the charm of cheerfulness, for it was, though so serenely beautiful, perhaps a little sad. The eighteenth-century panelling was painted in dim green, and three tall windows at one side looked out at the garden while, at the other, was a beautiful fireplace. In the walls were deep niches filled with rows of old china, and sedate chairs with backs and seats embroidered in green and dove-colour were ranged along the wall.

“And look at my china roses,” said Toppie, pleased, Alix saw, by her involuntary pause of pleasure. “Aren’t they rather wonderful for November? Only smell how sweet.” And Alix bent over the bowl filled with the little deep pink roses.

There was a sedate sofa to match the chairs, with the tea-table placed as at the Bradleys’; but how different was this tea. No thick bread-and-butter; no loaves of cake. Only a plate of little dry biscuits, that Alix liked, however, and another of bread-and-butter cut to a wafer-like thinness. And instead of the affectionate turmoil of Heathside was Toppie’s sweet, chill voice and Mr. Westmacott’s silence. He drank his tea, looking, with his crossed legs, which should have been in buckled knee-breeches, more than ever like d’Alembert; addressed a courteous question to Alix about her journey and her mother’s health, and soon went away, back to his writing-table; but not, Alix felt, to do much of significance there. He had a tall head and a meditative eye; but there was something of the sheep in his appearance, too. If he had had the close curled wig, that went with his type he would, Alix thought, have looked very like a silent, dignified sheep that may, in the meadow, as it looks at you, emit once or twice a formal baa.

Toppie told her that her father was writing a book on the Stoics. “He has, fortunately, a great deal of time. It’s a tiny parish; just right for a scholar like my father; more a scholar than a priest, I sometimes think. He is rather shy with people and his life here suits him perfectly.”

“Are not Stoics the people who do not mind the things other people mind?” Alix inquired.

“They cared, perhaps, so much for some things that other things did not hurt,” said Toppie, smiling. “I don’t know much about them, myself, though; I’m not at all learned. I’ve never been to school.”

“I am glad you are not learned. One may go to school and yet not be learned; as you can see from me,” Alix smiled back. “But I can’t imagine what those things can be that keep us from being hurt; can you?”

Toppie looked at her meditatively for a moment. “You said you were not dévote; but doesn’t your religion tell you what things they are?” she asked.

“Le bon Dieu, do you mean?” Alix inquired doubtfully. “La Sainte Vierge? One’s Guardian Angel?”

“Yes. When you go to church, to confession, aren’t you told?”

“We are told a great deal; but I am afraid I have never paid much attention. I only go to confession once a year. Maman insists on it. I do not like it,” said Alix. “Had the Stoics a bon Dieu and a Sainte Vierge to console them, then?”

“Oh, no! no!—you very ignorant child!” Toppie was perforce smiling again, though Alix saw that she was distressed. “They lived very nobly without our faith to help them.—In my church we do not have your beautiful Sainte Vierge to look to, you know.”

“I know,” said Alix. “And I do not understand why you should leave her out. I like her better than le bon Dieu, I must confess. But then rectors could not feel as we do about a Sainte Vierge, could they?”

“And why not?”

“Could one feel like that and be married?”

“Oh, you funny child!” Toppie was really laughing, and Alix, seeing how she amused her, laughed, too. This was so much better than talking about the dead.—“You mean a priest could not? We are quite different about that, too. But I see what you mean”—Toppie’s eyes dwelt on her—“and sometimes I think that you are right. I think, perhaps”—Toppie was grave now—“that the best life could be lived if one were quite free; with no close human ties. One could live better for God, and for humanity, then. And we have nuns in our church, too, Alix.”

“Oh, but it is dreadful to be a nun!” Alix exclaimed. “I had an old great-aunt who was a nun. Grand-père’s sister. I was always taken to see her in her convent in Lyon. She came to a grille and blessed me through it. She was like a sad old fish in an aquarium. One felt that her flesh must be cold. It would be death to me, such a life. And you? Can you really imagine it?”

“Perhaps not an order like that, that shuts one quite away,” said Toppie; “but there are nursing and teaching orders. Yes, I can imagine it. Not while I have my father; but if I were alone.”

“No, no! Do not imagine it!” Alix exclaimed, and there rose before her the memory of Giles’s face as he had watched Toppie yesterday evening. “Do not even imagine it. It is too dreadful. I am sorry that in your church you have nuns, too. That is foolish of you, I think, when you need not have them. It is different for priests. They have to administer the sacraments. But for a woman it is dreadful. Far, far better marry and be out in the world.”

“Perhaps.” Toppie was smiling sadly at her, seeing her, it was evident, as quite a child, yet touched by her feeling. “But if all question of marrying is over, the situation alters. You could not understand while you are so young.—See, Alix, I want you to look at this.” She moved forward a fire-screen, a square of satin on a mahogany stand. “Are you interested in needlework? French girls do it so beautifully, I know. My mother embroidered this. She copied it from those old chairbacks. Do look at them. Her grandmother did those.”

The screen, on a background of pearly satin, had two doves in a basket, entwined with laurel; and the chairs, in a softer, sadder key, repeated them.

“They are beautiful,” said Alix. It seemed to her, as she looked at the gentle doves, that the dead, in Toppie’s drawing-room, joined pale hands around her and whispered: “We are here.” But it was so sad. The doves nestling side by side, so confident of love, made her think of all the partings of the world.

“My great-grandmother was married to a soldier,” said Toppie, “and went out to India and died there when my grandfather was born. She did all those chairs while she was waiting for his birth. She was only twenty-one. I often think of her; so young; stitching her thoughts of home, her hopes for her baby—the past and the future—into the embroidery. And one feels how happy she must have been in her marriage to have chosen that design. My poor great-grandfather brought all her things back to England, with his little boy.—That funny little water-colour sketch is of him, in his frilled cap; with his ayah.—And he grew up to be a soldier, too, and was killed, out in India, fighting a frontier tribe. My mother was his only child. I was fourteen when she died. How happy you are to have your mother, Alix. She makes beautiful things, too. I shan’t forget the little lemon silk jacket.”

Alix’s sense of sadness had deepened while Toppie spoke. So different Toppie’s past; so different Toppie’s mother, she felt sure: and the sense of sadness was in the difference. An abyss seemed to lie between her and Toppie, an abyss that Toppie did not see and could not, perhaps, even imagine. She could not place Toppie against any of the backgrounds familiar to her. She could not see her in Maman’s salon, unless as one of those dim evasive figures, the “Misses” of her childhood, someone dressed differently, hovering diffidently and helping with the tea and cakes. She could see Toppie in Maman’s salon as her governess, but in no other capacity. Toppie would not understand anything said there, or would not care to understand. She would draw away from the shining soap-bubble. She would look with cold dismay at madame Gérardin and mademoiselle Fontaine. It was sad to feel fond of someone and to feel them fond of you, and yet to see that only here, among her doves, could their worlds touch at all.

It was growing dark, and Toppie said that she would take her home, and, in the hall, lighted a little lantern for the walk across the common. They had gone halfway when they saw, in the distance, another lantern advancing towards them.

“It is Giles,” said Toppie, pausing. “He has come for you. So I will go back. I have some letters to finish for the post.”

“But come to meet him. He will, I am sure, be glad of a word with you,” said Alix. She felt sure that it had been in the hope of a word with Toppie rather than to fetch herself that Giles had come.

“Oh, we have so many words; every day; all our lives long,” said Toppie, and, though she continued to advance, Alix felt a slight constraint in her voice. “He is a dear, is he not, Giles?” she added, as if irrelevantly.

“Oh, a dear!” said Alix. “I felt him that at once. And so good; and so intelligent.”—“More intelligent than Captain Owen; more good,” was in her mind. But that made, she knew, no difference. People were not loved for their intelligence, or their goodness, either.

“A great dear, Giles,” Toppie repeated, but with no intention, evidently, of being urged by her young companion’s warmth beyond her own sense of due commendation. “Owen loved him devotedly. After his mother it was Giles he loved best of all his family.”

“They were all three of the same pâte, were they not.”

“Pâte?” Toppie questioned. Her French was not quite so good as Giles’s.

“The paste, you know, of which earthenware or porcelain is made.”