The Little French Girl

by Anne Douglas Sedgwick

Alix had to think; it was not a new wonder; but she seemed to feel it newly, now that Giles was there to help her with it. “Perhaps you see it, Giles,” she suggested. “Is it something in her nature? Is it because she left my father? Perhaps you see the danger I can only fear. You give me that feeling sometimes. I am so much younger than you. There are things I do not understand.”

“Yes. I see. Yes.” Giles stood there. “You trust me with it all, then.”

“I trust you with everything, Giles.”

“You help me, and I’ll help you if ever I get the chance. I’ll not forget, Alix.” He put out his hand as he said these words and Alix felt that their clasp was on a pact. Yet, as he turned from her and went back to his chair, she had still the feeling that it was of her, not of Maman, that he was thinking. It was as if he saw her in danger.

CHAPTER IX

It was evident to Alix, thinking and thinking of it in the day and night that followed her talk with Giles, that the best way of helping him was not to be there at all. The greater the distance between her and Maman’s life and Toppie’s life, the safer would Toppie be. She should never, oh, never, have come at all, and Maman would never have let her could she have known that Captain Owen had kept that inculpating silence. But she could not tell Maman of that now. If Toppie must not be hurt, neither must Maman. It would hurt her, terribly, even if she, like Giles, saw at once the reason for it. But she wrote to Maman the next morning, sitting there behind Giles, and begged that she might come home.

She had been long enough in England, she said. It was not that she was unhappy; they were all too kind for that. But it was not her life. She was a sea-fish—Alix found the simile, feeling that it would be helpful with Maman—and they were river-fishes, and she was not comfortable in their water. Je vous supplie, Maman chérie, laissez-moi revenir.

Eight days passed before Maman’s answer arrived. It was decisive. She could not think of having Alix back till Spring. It was everything to her to know that her darling was benefiting by all the advantages of Heathside. Even had there not been the wretched question of money, she would have chosen to have her there and Alix must not fret; how far less trying it was for her to be at Heathside with such good friends than if, like so many jeunes filles de son âge, she had been in a convent. As for herself, she was starting in a few days with friends for a little trip to Italy and would not be back in Paris till April or May. Maman was evidently preoccupied, yet determined. There was nothing for it but to submit.

A few days after this, Alix and Giles and Mrs. Bradley motored to Oxford. She did not enjoy the drive. It was sad to be losing Giles. She did not know how she would find Heathside without him. The cold, grey day matched her mood, and as they entered the mean, modern streets of Oxford, at dusk, she thought that she had never seen so triste a town and wondered that it could harbour beauty and antiquity.

Giles’s rooms, however, were amusing. They belonged to another world. One went through old courtyards where the stone was peeling in great flakes from the walls, up narrow stone staircases, winding and winding, with names on the doors one passed, and found oneself at last, high up, overlooking a quadrangle of green, in a solid, pleasant room which might have been waiting for Giles during the years of his absence, so expressive of his personality were the blazing fire, the deep chairs, even the blue-and-white tea-cups that waited on the central table.