They were silent for a little while. Then Toppie said: “And you, dear Giles?”
“I? Oh, I’m getting on quite nicely, Toppie, dear,” Giles smiled back at her. “I shall take my First, I think.”
“Yes. But I didn’t mean you only, you alone. I mean you and Alix. What are you going to do with our dear little Alix?”
“Ah, there’s a long story there,” said Giles. “Have you heard anything about Jerry Hamble?”
“Only what your mother wrote about some trouble that Alix felt it better to be away from.—I knew it could not be only that. I knew what other trouble there was.—Oh, Giles—I was so cruel to Alix.—I could not think of what I said.—But tell me about Jerry.”
Giles found, when he began to tell her about Jerry and Alix, that it was not easy. There were still things that he must hide from Toppie. It was, he knew, everything to her to believe that Owen had given his heart to a woman not ignoble. But with all the celestial charity that had come to her vision of life, how could she believe madame Vervier anything but ignoble if she knew of Owen’s successor? “Lady Mary heard things about her, you see,” he said. “She heard the things we know, Toppie. Madame Vervier has made them easy to hear, and Lady Mary felt that since it was so Alix wasn’t a possible person for her son to marry.”
“But I thought she loved Alix,” Toppie said. She was not thinking of madame Vervier and the things Lady Mary had heard. She was thinking of Alix.
Giles knew again the flavour of his old bitterness. “She doesn’t love her enough. Perhaps one shouldn’t expect it.”
“But one does expect it. And does he love her enough?” asked Toppie.
Giles stopped to meditate. He had often to meditate over Jerry. “I see a lot of him, you know,” he said presently. “He’s always coming to me. I think he regards me as their tutelary deity. He shows me all her letters—I think he’d be quite willing to show me his.—Yes, they write to each other. Alix writes one letter to his four, Jerry complains, and her letters are models of deportment. They might be read aloud to anybody. Yes;—he loves her quite enough, if she’d have him now, against his parents’ wishes. It’s waiting that’s so hard for Jerry. He needs to do things on the crest of the wave, and Alix keeps him in the trough. He gets absolutely no encouragement from Alix. Thus far and no farther, is what all her letters really say.”