“Cared for enough! To leave Maman! To leave France!” Alix held her head high and stared before her, facing this confirmation of her fears. And suddenly, her last words echoing too unbearably in her heart, he saw her lips tremble; part; and the tears, at last, helplessly ran down her cheeks.
“Oh—my dear little Alix—don’t grieve like that,” Giles implored. “Of course you won’t leave them;—unless you come to feel that you care so much for someone that you can.—And it would never be really to leave. And while you’re over there, can’t we count a little for you? Can’t I count? You know how much I care for you. I’ll do my best to make you happy.”
Alix shook her head. “It is not that,” she uttered brokenly.
“What is it, then? You shan’t be married against your will.” Giles tried to smile at her.
“It is not that,” Alix repeated. “Already you are too good to me. You are unbelievably good to me.—It is Maman.” Alix put her hand up to her eyes and hid her tears from him as she walked. “It is Maman.—How can she bear to let me go?—How can I bear to be parted from her; far away; hardly seeing her; until I am old?”
CHAPTER XIV
“Then she is coming back. I am so glad. I was afraid, from things she said, once or twice, about herself, about her life in France with her mother, that she might not be coming,” said Toppie.
She and Giles sat up on the ridge where the junipers grew. The pine-woods were behind them; below were the birches in their autumnal dress of bronze and gold; and brooding over all a sky of dusty rose. It was the evening of the hottest September day and the breeze hardly stirred the spices of the pines.
Giles was only just back from his Cornish trip and Toppie and her father had been in Bournemouth when he had returned from France, so that this was their first meeting. Mr. Westmacott was not well and the sea had done him no good. Toppie was worn with nursing him. Giles had never seen her look so white.
From something deep and watchful in her eyes the feeling came to him that her father was even more ill than they had guessed and that she was schooling herself to the thought of losing him. With her father gone, Toppie’s last close link with earth would be severed.