Left alone, Alix went out to her favourite walk, the little path under the garden wall, half obliterated by heather and grass, its bordering gorse bushes all broken into soft clusters of gold set in prickles and smelling of apricots. Bareheaded, her arms wrapped in her blue-and-grey scarf, she walked, smelling the gorse, feeling the sunshine, listening to a blackbird that fluted golden arabesques on the April air; while above her head the leaning fruit-boughs were full of thick grey-green buds. The sense of excitement that had been with her since the day of Jerry’s declaration was immeasurably deepened this afternoon by her imaginative sharing of Giles’s ordeal. Jerry and Giles were mingled in her thoughts, and her mind recoiled from the striving of pain and hope and fear brought to it by their united images. Perhaps it was because she thus evaded her deep preoccupation, perhaps it was because she paced thus in the sunlight, as he had paced, that her memory, suddenly liberated, took a long flight backward to find Grand-père going along the terrace at Montarel with his dragging step and sombre eye. It was so strange to think of Grand-père now. Since the day of her first arrival in England he had hardly visited her thoughts. And with what a new sadness she saw him again and felt once more his melancholy flow into her. Was it because she had for so long forgotten him and gone so far from him and Montarel that she felt thus suddenly the gloomy pressure of his eyes? It was as if he watched her, her life involved in lives so remote from his sympathy. It was not only the young yearning of her heart towards Jerry’s yearning that seemed a betrayal of Grand-père; this sharper yearning, not towards but over Giles, showed her as even more removed and alien. Young love Grand-père might have understood; but hardly this identification with an Englishman’s hopes and fears. She doubted whether Grand-père had ever in his life spoken to an English person. He had disliked the English. She recalled how, when she read her history to him, he would interrupt her to speak bitterly about them. “_Un peuple pratique; sans idéal_,” he had said. And he had said that England had always schemed against France and made use of her grace and generosity. How strange that was to remember now as she waited for Giles and listened to the blackbird. They had not schemed against her; France’s daughter; nor made use of her. Would it not be truer to say that France, through her helpless person, had schemed against and made use of them?