Alix felt her heart stand still. “Captain Owen—Captain Owen has parted them,” she thought. And the unseen fear that had that morning pressed so near was there beside her now. It was a compulsion laid upon her; a necessity that was not now to be escaped, though still she did not see it clearly. She stood by Giles, gazing down at him, and her young face was stern rather than pitiful. It was hardly of Giles that she was thinking; or it was of his suffering rather than of him. It was because of Giles’s suffering that the necessity was laid upon her.
Even when, as if he felt her near in his darkness, he put out an arm and drew her to him, for the comfort of her closeness, even while she thought, “I am his mother now,” her face kept its sternness.
He spoke at last. “She’s going to leave us, Alix.”
“Going to leave us?” Alix wondered if Toppie were dying.
“She’s going into a convent. She’s going to be a nun. It was all settled at Bath. But she’s been meaning it for a long time.”
“Yes. I knew,” Alix murmured. “She told me that on the first day.”
“You knew?” In his astonishment Giles relinquished his clasp and fixed his broken gaze upon her.
“On that first day. When I went to see her. She told me that she could understand the wish to be a nun. She told me that you had them in your Church. If one were alone, she said, it might be the best life.”
Giles now got up and moved, stumbling, towards the sofa, and, Alix following him, they sat down.
“It’s because of him,” said Giles. He leaned his arm on the end of the sofa and kept his face covered.