They had reached the road that wound among the birch-woods and dusk had fallen in it. The sky, paled to a faint apricot tint, shone dimly between the trees. Toppie stood still on the wayside grass and looked at him. Ineffaceably, in this instant of strange, unbelievable alienation (for had he not, in his last words, challenged Toppie with madame Vervier’s standards as set against her own?), Toppie’s image was stamped upon his mind; as ineffaceably as on that first time he had seen her. And now all her light was withdrawn. It was the end, as that had been the beginning. Pale, wraith-like in the dusk, she fixed her eyes upon him and they were dark with their repudiation. “Alix is not the product of her mother. Alix is good and her mother may be bad. You know better than I do what you think of her mother. It’s you I find fault with, Giles. Your words don’t tell me what you think.” “I’ve kept nothing from you,” said Giles. It was a lie. He knew it, and he saw that Toppie knew it. He attempted an amendation of his statement. “Everything you’ve asked I’ve answered.” “Have you? I will ask this, then. Did she leave her husband with monsieur Vervier? Did her husband divorce her because of monsieur Vervier? Was she unfaithful to her husband?” “There were faults on both sides, I believe. Alix wouldn’t have been given for half the time to her mother if there hadn’t been faults on both sides.” Giles forced himself to speak steadily. “She was very young. People don’t judge these things so hardly nowadays.” Toppie, her eyes on his, put aside the palliation. “Did she leave monsieur Vervier with another man? Was she unfaithful to monsieur Vervier, too? Is she a woman who has had lovers?” said Toppie, and the word was strange on her lips. Giles stood there, stricken. He was so aware of horrible danger, pressing in upon him and Toppie from every side, that he could hardly command his thoughts to an order. All that came was a helpless literalness. There was no refuge from Toppie’s eyes; for her, or for himself. “Yes,” he said, “I’m afraid she is. That’s the trouble, you see.” Toppie then looked away from him. She looked round her, standing so still, with no gesture of amazement or distress. But there was a sudden wildness in her eyes. “Toppie, dear Toppie,” Giles pleaded. “She is not a bad woman. Wrong; but not bad. You can’t judge of these things. I’m not defending her.—It’s only that, seeing her, seeing all the beauty she has made in her life, I cannot feel about her mistakes as I should have thought I would. That’s why you felt me strained in speaking of her. It was a shock to me. And I didn’t want you to know. Put it away now, Toppie, I do beg of you. It has nothing, nothing to do with us. She’s a very beautiful, a very unfortunate woman, and it’s only by chance that we’ve stumbled upon these unhappy things in her past.”