“Well, how did you find Toppie?” he asked simply, as they met.—Giles not true! Giles easily misled! Alix felt herself suddenly blushing with anger as the thought of Toppie’s strange delusion returned to her. Giles drew her arm within his and they went across the common towards the birch-wood. It gave her a deep feeling of consolation that he should thus seek refuge with the one person who could understand him.
“I find her changed, Giles,” she said.
“In what way changed?” said Giles quickly.
And as quickly Alix answered: “Not at all to me, Giles.”
“You see how desperately ill her father is, don’t you?” said Giles. “She’s quite worn out with nursing him, you know. In what way do you feel her changed?” he repeated, looking down into her face.
Alix was pondering. She was not a person who believed in black and white. She believed in the greys and the in-between shades. She did not mean to tell Giles how she thought Toppie changed. What she found to say was: “If Toppie were happier she would not be so hard.”
“Hard?” She was looking at the ground, but she heard in Giles’s voice how the word startled him.
“Do you not think Toppie hard?” she asked.
“If she is,” said Giles after a moment, “it’s because of what you say—that she is unhappy.”
“And because she is too sure,” said Alix. They had entered the birch-wood and their footsteps rustled in the fallen golden leaves. They went forward, aimlessly, not thinking of where they went, Alix intent on her reading of Toppie, Giles listening. “Too sure of what she loves and believes in. She has had to be too sure, because she is so unhappy.—Is that it, Giles? And the things she loves and believes in are not the things she sees. Perhaps that makes us hard—if we can only think of the things we love and never see or touch them—makes us hard, I mean, to the things we have with us.”