Monsieur de Maubert said he delighted in the plan. He would merely take precautions against a courant d’air; and to ensure him further from this calamity his chair was placed in a corner behind the table, Giles aiding in his disposal and amused by the idea of Jove sheltering from a courant d’air.
“Oh, breakfast here! Quel bonheur!” cried Alix, emerging. She made Giles think of a swallow as she skimmed out, her feet in their heelless espadrilles hardly seeming to touch the ground. André de Valenbois also, he saw, noted her swiftness, her light, direct movement; noted, too, no doubt, her clear face, stern in its carven structure, yet sweet in smile and glance. Alix was really growing up; she was already a person to be noted by a young man with an eye for beauty in all its manifestations, and Giles, while monsieur de Valenbois’ eyes rested almost musingly upon her, knew a fraternal, nay, almost a paternal, stir of anxious surmise. Would that be a solution? He did not feel the need of a solution for Alix’s problem to be so pressing as he had on the steamer yesterday. It was difficult in this radiant milieu to believe her so in need of rescue. However heinous madame Vervier’s fault, she could not, without manifest priggishness, be seen as a mother unfit to care for a daughter. But problem or no problem, it would be a comfort to know Alix settled, and during coffee and rolls he began to see, very plainly, that this settlement must almost certainly have presented itself to madame Vervier. If André de Valenbois were here on these terms of happy intimacy, when her child arrived, had she not seen to it that he was here? Could she have chosen better? If Alix was charming, so was he; he was, indeed, Giles considered, having not thought much of Alix as in the category, more obviously charming than she was; a veritable prince of the fairy-tale in face, form, and demeanour, and if Alix was not already affected by his presence that could only be because she was still so much a child. He was not a young man to leave a maiden’s fancy unaffected.
“A penny for your thoughts, monsieur Giles,” monsieur de Valenbois’ voice broke in, disconcertingly, upon his meditations. That he had allowed them to become absorbing was evident to him from the smiles that met his eyes as he raised them. He felt himself foolishly blushing.
“Giles never talks much at breakfast,” Alix commented.
“I don’t get much chance to, at home, do I?” said Giles, grateful for her intervention.
“You shall have every chance here,” said madame Vervier. “We rarely have a young English philosopher among us. We must profit by the occasion.” Her smile was very kind.
“I know what monsieur Giles was thinking of,” said monsieur de Valenbois.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Giles laughed.
“I wager you!” monsieur de Valenbois challenged him, tilting back his chair, his brilliantly blue eyes on his friend. “Do you defy me?”
“Absolutely,” said Giles.