Her English was so good that she saw him at once a little reassured. He had shouted like that partly from embarrassment and partly because he thought she might only understand if he talked loud. His face, as he seized her box in his other hand, echoed her smile as it had echoed her distress. It was a kind face. It echoed people’s feelings easily.
“Let me take the bag; you cannot carry all,” said Alix.
But he shoved himself sideways through the door and then held it open while she passed out, commenting as he did so, “But, I say, you’re not a child!”
“A year makes a great difference,” said Alix. “And I was not really so young; already fifteen, when Captain Owen first saw me, last October, in Cannes.”
Monsieur Giles said nothing to this, and she wondered what Captain Owen had written of her and Maman after that first meeting.
Now they were sitting opposite each other at a little table that seemed to have a great many cruets and salt-cellars upon it. It was a very bright and very ugly room, and through the doors, opening and shutting incessantly, came the muffled roar of incoming trains; but after the waiting-room it was homelike. She was safe with monsieur Giles. He was a person who made you feel safe. Soup was put before them, all substance and no savour, but she ate it eagerly, and said that, yes, please, she would like fish.
“And then the beef,” said Giles to the waiter, who had a pallid face and looked, Alix thought, detached and meditative as he was, like a littérateur.
“I don’t advise the beef, Sir,” he said in a low, impassive voice. “It’s specially tough to-day, Sir. You’d do better with the mutton.”
“Mutton, then, by all means!” said Giles, laughing. “Rather nice, that, what?” he asked, smiling at Alix across the table when the waiter was gone.
He showed beautiful white teeth when he smiled. They were his only beauty; though she liked his golden-green eyes, fig-coloured. His face was vehement, almost violent in structure with a prominent nose and so high a top to his head that it seemed to be boiling over. Though he looked so kind, he looked also as if he could get angry rather easily, with a steady, reasonable anger, and the more she observed him the less she found him like his brother. Captain Owen’s lips, though broad, had been delicately curved, and his nut-shaped eyes had always seemed to smile a little lazily. Sweetness rather than strength had been in his face and an air of taking everything lightly. She had always felt of him that he would fight just as if he were playing tennis; whereas when Giles fought, she felt sure, he would clench his teeth and look fierce and sick. And though he was younger than Captain Owen, he was far more worn, strangely worn for one so young; and he was not at all homme du monde.