“I believe she will. I’ll do my best,” Giles muttered.
Yet, as he looked down at the grass, sitting there filially at madame Vervier’s feet, he knew that his heart was torn in two and that he longed to put his head down on her knees and tell her that no one in the world would ever love Alix as he himself did.
CHAPTER VIII
When Giles came down to breakfast next morning, Alix was already there, setting a bowl of nasturtiums on the blue-and-white cloth. He had not had a word with her last night when a sudden fall of rain had kept them all in the drawing-room, and he seized his opportunity.
“Will you have a long walk with me this morning, Alix?” he said. “A really long one, you know. I want to go to Allongeville and see the church again; and then, oh, a long way further. Along the cliffs for ever so far.”
She looked at her flowers, drawing a leaf forward here and there around the edge of the bowl, and he saw that she was troubled. But she said: “We will go to the church, at all events. Yes. I should like a walk very much.”
André entered as she spoke the words and she went on quietly, giving Giles a suffocating sense of the imminence of peril from her very readiness, her very calm: “Do you not think nasturtiums very charming flowers, Giles? No one ever speaks of them;—yet they are charming. The leaves; the colour. I like them, and yet I do not love them. Why is it? There are no yellow flowers of Summer that one can love. The yellow of Spring is so different.”
“One doesn’t love any of the things of Summer as one does the things of Spring,” André remarked, strolling to the window to look out, and, clearly this morning, Giles divined what he had only surmised yesterday, that his temper was not attuned to brightness; that there might even lurk beneath its graceful surface a vindictive watchfulness. And when he had spoken he turned, leaning against the window, and looked at Alix, poised in her whiteness above the bowl of glowing flowers, looked at her as Giles had never before seen him look; as if with resentment that she should be so beautiful; as if with a challenge to her to deny his right to find her so.
“Oh, but that is not so,” said Alix. “One loves roses—especially white roses;—and carnations; and jasmine; nothing in Spring is more lovely than jasmine.”
“I would give them all for a handful of primroses,” said André, his eyes fixed on her.