“I wrote to her that you were coming,” said Alix. Her mind had perhaps been following some train of thought not far removed from his, for she spoke as if they were continuing a theme rather than taking it up. “She will be delighted.”
“Will she? Look here, Alix”—Giles gazed down over the railing at the sea—“she couldn’t be delighted, I take it, if she knew that I had a grievance about my brother on her account.”
He had spoken very abruptly, yet he had, he felt, put it well. In the little pause that followed his words, he was pleased with himself for having found any so colourless and unprovocative.
“What we know of your brother,” said Alix after her pause, “would not give her a grievance against you; only against him.”
“Against him?”
“Did he not deceive her, too?”
“Deceive her? Oh, I see. You think he didn’t tell her that he’d kept us in the dark?”
“He could not have told her, Giles; if that is really what you are asking me.”
Giles, a little confused, retraced his steps. “What I’m really asking you is whether you’ve told her. I want to know where I stand with her. Haven’t you felt that she ought to be told?”
Again Alix was silent, and for a longer time. Then she said: “It has been my great perplexity. She does not know. Of course she does not know. But I wrote to her at once, that time last Winter, and begged that I might come home; and when I found she could not have me, I thought it best to say nothing then. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you will blame me, Giles. But I thought it best to wait. It will give her such pain when she knows.”