If madame Vervier’s voice showed full adequacy, so did her child’s. Alix’s adequacy, her grave courtesy, untinged by withdrawal, yet setting a barrier, filled Giles’s thoughts during the meal. She, too, knew just what she wanted to say and just how to say it; yet how much deeper, he felt sure, was her perturbation than madame Vervier’s. She had seen her mother, before the eyes of her English friend, involve herself in a web of implicit falsehood. How false was madame Vervier’s web Alix could not know; but she had known enough to feel ashamed before him; not, Giles knew, because Maman lied; but because she had need of lies. She herself had also lied. Giles, on their journey, had seen Toppie’s photograph in her dressing-case. She had lied because she wished to remove Toppie, as well as herself, from even an indirect intimacy with André de Valenbois. It was as though some deep instinct warned her against him. And though Giles again deplored her readiness, he could not feel that he regretted it. She sat opposite him, all silvery in the soft candle-light, her young downcast face set in its narrow frame of hair, and he knew that grief and fear were in her heart. Madame Vervier talked much, for her, and her gaze, turned once or twice on her child, seemed, as was its wont, to include her and to carry her on to further depths of contemplation. But even madame Vervier could not guess what was in Alix’s heart. After supper they all went out on the verandah. The vines fluttered against a moonlit sky and moonlight washed in upon them like a silvery tide. Mademoiselle Blanche, wrapped in swansdown, came gliding in, and Jules, with a pipe, emerged from the shadows and sat in his accustomed place on the steps. Giles felt that it soothed the lacerated heart of the young artist to be with madame Vervier. Like a wounded wild animal, he drew near the hand he trusted. She was capable of compassion; of great gentleness; of most disinterested friendship. An enigma to Giles, there she sat, and her soft, meditative alto joined in the old songs they all sang together, while Alix, behind her in the shadow, leaned her head, as if weary, upon her shoulder and listened. But more than weariness was expressed in the child’s attitude. Giles, listening to the dove-like tenderness of “_L’Amour de moi_,” divined it all. Alix sought comfort from the pressure of new apprehensions, new intuitions, new complexities; and more than for herself, it was for Maman that she thus drew near. The very love, tender, devout, brooding, of the song, was in the gesture with which she laid her head beside her mother’s and looked out across her breast into the unknown future. CHAPTER IX