How strange it was. Madame Vervier had said almost those words only a year ago and they had wakened not an echo in him. Now, as he heard them spoken in Toppie’s confident voice a great confusion of fear, pain, loneliness started up in Giles’s heart. It was as if he had been waiting for Toppie to say them; as if he had felt that deep-toned bell hanging in some sanctuary of his nature and known that Toppie would thus strike upon it, sending the reverberations far into the past as well as into the future. For a moment he could hardly think, he was so deafened by the clamour, and then the first words that came were helpless words: “She wouldn’t have me, Toppie, dear.” “Why not?” smiled Toppie. She had taken his avowal quite for granted. “If she loves anyone, it’s Jerry.” “They won’t marry,” said Toppie. “There are too many difficulties; and he doesn’t love her enough.” “Yes, he does, if he’s helped. It’s someone like Jerry she needs; someone young and gay, with things to offer her. I’ve nothing to offer Alix.” “You have your love. No one will ever love Alix as you do.” Toppie’s loving eyes scanned his face while her confident voice thus assured him. “But that’s no reason, for her.—She’ll have other people’s love. It’s true, dear Toppie; of course. I see it’s true; and I suppose I’ve known it for a long time. But Alix would never think of me like that. She thinks of me as her brother. She thinks of me as her father, almost; as someone kind and gruff and paternal. Alix is the fairy princess, and I’m just the good old beast who carries her around on my back.” “Fairy princesses marry the good old beast and then he turns into a fairy prince,” said Toppie. “You’re so much more of a fairy prince already, Giles, than you imagine.” “But she has her full-fledged fairy prince waiting ready to fly off with her. He may have his defects; but, all the same, he is the real thing. He can give her the crystal dress and the prancing steed and the dancing to flutes and cymbals.—Oh, you know perfectly well, Toppie, darling, all the things I can never give her and that she loves with all her heart. It’s queer, you know; I’ve wanted so to make Alix over into something more English, and what I see is that she’s made me into something more French. I’d have been indignant at the idea of fairy princes two years ago; and at marriages with an object of advantage in them;—but now I’ve been inoculated with a drop of the French realism. Alix accepts the world and sees it as it is in a way that you and I, Toppie, and people of our sort, never could. And she’s made me worldly for her. I see the advantages for her, and I want her to have them. She’s not a romantic English girl. She’d never believe in all for love and the world well lost.”