He was striding along the upland now, among the fields of golden grain. The sea-breeze blowing on his face seemed to speak of Alix, and his thoughts, almost with a sense of tears, dwelt on her, on what he divined of the child’s nature; so young, yet so mature; so sensitive, yet so hard; and above all so passionately loyal. What would she feel when she knew the truth?—He came back to the first question. They must all have an order, a code, these strange French people. They none of them stood alone. The individual was implicated through every fibre in the group to which he belonged. Would Alix, when she knew, accept the jungle and its code? What else was there for her to do? Giles was asking himself this fundamental question by the time he reached Les Chardonnerets and was finding the only answer to it. There was nothing that Alix could do. But he could do something. He and his mother and all of them. Keep her. Away from the jungle; and away from the citadel, too. “Damn it!” Giles heard himself remarking as he marched towards the verandah. “It thinks itself too good for her and she’s too good for it. She shall belong to us. It’s the only way out,” said Giles. CHAPTER VII He had mounted the steps, head bent, hands thrust deeply into his pockets, and had actually cast himself into a garden-chair before he saw that he was not alone. Over there in the corner near the little table where the reviews and newspapers were laid, and the fluttering vines tempered the sunlight, sat monsieur de Maubert, a book upon his knee and his eyeglasses on his nose. He was looking above them, across at Giles, and the young man was terribly disconcerted in seeing him. “I beg your pardon,” he muttered; “I didn’t know anybody was here.” “I have only just returned,” said monsieur de Maubert in his Olympian tones, “and there is no occasion for apology. You were coming fast and you were thinking deep. You seem disturbed, Monsieur. Has anything occurred to incommode you?” Giles had pulled his chair around a little so that he faced monsieur de Maubert and as he heard the suave question he suddenly determined to answer it. Whatever monsieur de Maubert’s past relation to madame Vervier, he felt assured from what he had observed that his present one was based on a disinterested devotion. If he must try to persuade madame Vervier to give Alix up to them, it would assuredly be as well to gain monsieur de Maubert’s sympathy. “To tell you the truth, I am incommoded,” he said. “I’ve had a very nasty shock. Is that right? _Un mauvais coup?_—Well, you understand, I’m sure. We’re so fond of Alix, all of us, my mother and brothers and sisters; she almost seems to belong to us; and I’ve just been hearing two women talking at the tennis about her, and her mother; and about her future. Nice women. And they seemed to think there wasn’t any future for her except the theatre.”