It was then madame Vervier, after their little pause, who supplied, with a strange softness, the evident name.—“Toppie.” “Yes, Toppie.” Giles turned his head away and fixed his eyes on the blue outside. And madame Vervier sat silent. Very gently she laid down her stone—Giles was never to forget the look of that smooth, pinkish-grey stone—and folded her hands in her lap. She rested her eyes upon the young man—though his head was turned away from her Giles knew that she was looking at him;—and the silence, in the pale room, with the brilliant day beating from without upon it, grew long. It grew so long that Giles had time to draw his mind from his own confusion and to wonder what was in hers. Then, when she spoke, her voice was so new to him, so unexpected, that it was as if a new chapter in his knowledge of her opened gently before his eyes. Uncertainty, hesitation was in it; something almost shy; a lovely sweetness. It was revealed to him that for all her goddess-like invulnerability she might have known a qualm of pity for Toppie; it was revealed to him that a romantic girl still lived in her heart, rapt in the wonder of a love-story. “But then—does not that make it all right?” she said. “How do you mean, right?” Giles asked. “If you love Toppie?—Will you not marry her? Will you not both be happy?—In your beautiful English way of happiness—for ever after?” She was smiling at him from her cloud of shyness, seeming to feel the secret disclosed to her too beautiful and delicate for her to venture near its nest; and the childlike quality he had seen in her forehead irradiated all her features, while in sincerest, most ingenuous joy she forgot her own hopes. “You see,” said Giles—and he spoke gently to that child—“Toppie would never have me. She’ll never love anyone but Owen.” Owen’s name did not for a moment stay her. “Never? Oh, no. You are young enough to believe in that word; and so is she. I am old and wise in that. You may trust me when I tell you that it is a word too large for our slight human nature. So many eternities”—madame Vervier smiled at him—“I have seen melt away.” “She’d never have me,” Giles repeated. “You think that no one will have you. It is not so.—Have you tried?” “No.” Giles shook his head. “I don’t think I want to try, really—I don’t think I want her different.” “_Dieu!_” madame Vervier now breathed. “You will embrace a celibate life?” “I don’t know. Perhaps I shall. I never thought about it,” poor Giles muttered. “I’ve never thought about Toppie in that way. I’ve always loved her—ever since I was a boy—knowing that she could only be for somebody else.”