“Yes, it’s different in England,” Giles muttered, since she paused as if for his assent. He was still too transfixed by the sudden theme to dispose of his own thoughts. He felt as if madame Vervier, with her calm, her deliberation, her fluency, were casting, loop by loop, a silken net about him. And he, the dismayed and astonished fish, looked here and there through the meshes for a means of escape that would not too violently tear the web. “Quite different,” said madame Vervier with confidence. “That is why I sent her to England. That is why I make you my proposal now. In blood Alix is much your superior; your fortune, I know is small; your position obscure. But I like you monsieur Giles;—I like you very much. Oh, I have studied you since you came among us! And,” madame Vervier added, smiling with a kind of indulgence upon him, “you like Alix very much. I have seen that.” So she gathered up the last strand and considered her captive before drawing him definitely on shore. “And poor little Alix? Where does she come in?” broke from Giles. After his long mute immobility these were the first words that came to him. “Is she to be considered in the matter?” “Poor little Alix? Why poor?” madame Vervier questioned kindly. “It would not with you be brilliant; but it would be safe. You will be tender and faithful always. You have not to assure me of that. And you would, I am convinced, do all that is in your power to do in order that she may be well placed in the world.” “And aren’t her feelings to count at all in this disposal of her? She’d never have me,” Giles declared with a sort of indignant mirth. “I’m the last person in the world she’d ever think of.” “You underrate your attractions,” said madame Vervier, still more indulgently. “Alix is very fond of you. And she is still a child; singularly still a child. We may for a year or two put the question of Alix’s feelings aside. At her age one has no feelings. It lies with you, and with me, to see that when the time comes they are the right ones. She is devoted to you”—madame Vervier enlarged her assurance. “That is unquestionable.” “But I care for somebody else!” Giles heard himself almost shouting. It was unbelievable that he should have to say to madame Vervier what he had never explicitly said to himself; unbelievable that he must set the sacred figure of Toppie between them. But she was actually drawing him on shore and there was nothing for it but to break through. “Somebody else?” madame Vervier repeated. Giles had grown pale with the shock of his own avowal, yet, all the same, he was aware of a side glance at the comedy of her discomfiture. It was as if all the strands dropped from her hands. “Yes,” he nodded; “I love somebody else.” She might be discomfited, but she retained her resourcefulness. “Somebody I know of?” “Yes,” Giles doggedly repeated. “Somebody you know of.”