Giles, while she spoke, had put up his hand to rub in perplexity through his hair; now it paused. “To your mother?”
“Was it not a great wrong he did her, too?”
“How do you mean?” Giles’s voice was short and sharp.
It came over her with a wave of old bitterness that this was an aspect of the question he had too much ignored. “Does my mother’s dignity not count? It was as if he had something to hide in their friendship; as if he were ashamed. That was to do her a great wrong. He owed Maman so much. She had been home to him.”
The memory of all that he owed Maman, the lonely young soldier; fireside talks; happy walks; plays, pictures, people; the lavishing of all she had to give;—the best, was it not, that life had to show?—struck too deeply at her, and suddenly she felt her eyes fill with tears. For Giles, too, made part of the wrong to Maman. His silence had had its complicity. It was as if he, too, tacitly, had helped Captain Owen to hide something of which he, too, was ashamed.
“I know, I know,” Giles muttered. He saw her tears and he was dreadfully troubled. “Of course she was most awfully good to him.—I mean—I can’t imagine why he said nothing—I can’t imagine why.”
But wasn’t he lying now? He who had not spoken to his brother and to Maman in the Bois? The sharp tangle of her thoughts hurt her. She leaned her elbows on the table and her forehead on her hands. “I don’t understand,” she said, keeping herself from crying.
“Poor little kid! Poor little kid!” broke as if irresistibly from Giles. He was almost crying, too. He walked up and down behind her. She felt that he would have liked to kiss and comfort her as if she had been Ruth or Rosemary. But, turning away at last, he dropped into his chair before the fire and for a long time they were both silent.
“Look here, Alix,” he said suddenly at last. He had, it was evident, been thinking things out to quite new conclusions. “I wasn’t quite straight with you just now, and I want to be straight with you. I want you to be straight with me. Will you promise me to? Will you promise not to lie to me, ever?”
“Ever? How can I tell?” said Alix from between her hands. “It is sometimes necessary; if someone one loves is concerned.”