“Ah, when you are as old as I am,” said monsieur de Maubert, unperturbed, “you will think differently. You will by then, assuredly, intelligent as you are, have learned to make a better use of your time. You will have learned to round out your life by a richer experience.” Giles, too, had risen, and he could almost have laughed as he listened; it struck him as so comic, with its sadness, that the traditional rôles of youth and age should be thus reversed. “You will have learned,” monsieur de Maubert was going on, “to accept the full gamut of our human nature. There remains nothing, nothing, for the anchorite in his desert—let me assure you of it—but the handful of sand his dying hand clutches at. He has had, you will say, his mirage with which to console himself. That is a sorry consolation at the end. Accept reality, my young friend. Accept the full gamut. Neglect none of the strings of your violin. It is broken all too soon. And what more sad than to have stopped your ears against its sweetest melody?” “What, indeed?” said Giles. There was hardly irony in his voice. It was contemplative rather. And smiling at monsieur de Maubert as they stood there in the sunset, he added: “We want different things.” That simile of the unheard melody summed it up. CHAPTER VIII It was strange to meet them all again that evening, so unchanged to their own consciousness, so changed to his. Strange to find them still so charming and so to shrink from their charm. They came laughing up the steps of the verandah where he still sat, and he wondered if they felt in his voice and look, as he greeted them, any difference. “Ah, it was an excellent set,” André de Valenbois said, laying down his racquet and seating himself next to Giles. “Where did you disappear to, _mon ami_? We looked, and you were in the chalet, and when we looked again, you were gone.” “I felt I’d like a walk. I went up the hill behind the chalet,” said Giles. “The country is lovely up there.” Madame Vervier’s eyes were on him, hardly cogitative in their gaze, yet perhaps conjecturing something. She, doubtless, knew the names of the ladies of the chalet as well as they knew hers. She might infer the reasons for his flight. At all events, saying nothing, only maintaining her cool dim smile, she crossed the verandah and went into the house. The evening meal at Les Chardonnerets was irregular in its hour and informal in its habit. Monsieur de Maubert and André de Valenbois only changed their flannels for light afternoon clothes, and Jules, when he came, did not change at all. Giles maintained his custom of evening dress, but he waited for some time alone in the drawing-room that evening, and even after André had joined him, exquisite in pale blues and greys, another five minutes passed before madame Vervier and Alix appeared.