Giles stood motionless, gazing down at her. He was seeing, suddenly, straight into Toppie’s heart; straight into the heart of their situation. How futile were his denials, when he could deny only for himself—and not for the other. The vein of piercing intuition in Toppie had led her to the portals of the truth. The name she saw inscribed there was the wrong name; that was all. Change Giles to Owen, and the truth was in her grasp. She knew that madame Vervier was beautiful, mysterious, compelling. She knew that both he and Owen had felt her a goddess. A chill of fear crept about Giles’s heart.
“Come; we’d better be going,” he repeated. He heard that his voice was harsh. He would discuss no further and he held out his hand to her. Toppie took it and rose to her feet.
She meant to be kind to him. She meant to be his friend;—Giles said it to himself as, silently, they went down the hill together. But in spite of all his compassionate understanding of her, his fear for her, what came over him, in wave after wave of grief and resentment, was that she was cold and hard. He had made her suffer because of what she had felt as false in him; but it was now, as it had always been, of Owen that she was thinking. He had cast, thank Heaven, no shadow on Owen; but perplexity, mystery, pain had come into her vision of Owen’s friend.
“Owen never said she was a widow; but I’m sure he believed her to be one.—Forgive me, Giles, but have you heard what makes you think she may not be? What do you know of monsieur Vervier? Alix has never spoken of him. It is so strange; for if he were alive he would be with them, would he not?”
“C’était un bien méchant homme.” These words, in madame Vervier’s tones of surpassing detachment, came back to Giles. “Alix probably never saw him. Her mother spoke of him. She said he was a bad man.”
“She spoke of him to you?”
“Yes, to me.”
“And she didn’t say whether he were alive or dead?”
“No. We weren’t talking about him. We were talking about Alix and her future. Alix will have hardly any dot, it seems, because monsieur Vervier made away with all her mother’s money. They are parted.”
“Did she leave him, or did he leave her?”