“Ah. Yes,” said Giles as quietly as he was able. “I thought perhaps you’d feel it best.”
Alix, her dark brows slightly knotted, looked before her. “And I think she sent me here with you so that I should tell you,” she went on. “Tell you, I mean, that she believed what she said last night about Captain Owen and Toppie. That Toppie was first with him. Not until I told her of his silence to you all did she see—what you and I saw, Giles;—that he cared most for her.”
Giles sat, struck to an icy caution. Yes; he saw it in a flash; that was how she would put it to Alix. He could find no word. But Alix expected none. Carefully she continued her tale. “It made her very sad when I told her of his silence. It made her cry. But she was not angry with me for having kept it from her. She understood.”
“And was she angry with him?” Giles asked after a moment.
Alix at that turned her eyes upon him and he read in them a deep perplexity. “I do not know,” she said. “She did not say. I do not think she was angry with him either. She is a person who understands everything. But I do not think she would have been so unhappy if it had not hurt her very much. Why else should she cry?”
Why, indeed? Was it for her unveiling before himself? How difficult to think it after the blank gaze of those dark eyes. Was it not, rather, in fear and grief at seeing her child entangled, at last, in her vicissitudes? However it might be, there was a new burden on her heart and, inevitably, Alix now must bear part of its weight with her.
“Well, I’m glad it’s all out,” Giles murmured. “It makes everything simpler, doesn’t it?”
“Does it?” said Alix.
When she asked that, he was aware that part of his thought had been that it made it simpler in regard to Alix herself and what he hoped to do for her. But was he really so sure of this? Would madame Vervier be more willing to let them have Alix now that she saw all her vicissitudes disclosed to him?
“I hope she’ll have a talk with me,” he said. “One can’t talk, really, if things aren’t clear.”