If it was as bad as that, André, at all events, could assume his old air of unclouded radiancy. His eyes knew no shadow; his voice no hesitancy. Delicate, sweet, sharp, able to do what he liked, with himself and others, he was ready for any encounter, and Giles even imagined, as he stepped down before them, a touch of sullen anger running a darker vein along the heat in his blood, that André looked upon his English friend as offering little complexity or difficulty. With people so simple, so guileless, so ridiculous—for would not André see him as rather ridiculous?—nothing more was really needed than a light hand on the rein and the easiest of eyes on the landscape. They would go just where one wished and see as much or as little as one intended them to see. “Not so simple as you think, perhaps, my friend,” Giles was saying to himself. But to know that he might see things that André would not suspect him of seeing did not exercise the sickness in his blood. At the same time, underneath everything, he was astonished, in a side glance as it were, to see that he was not hating him; was still feeling him charming. “Here we all are, then, again. What a triumph over destiny!” was what André was saying—and it was on him that Giles kept his eyes. He felt that he must pull himself well together before looking at Alix.—“I never expect happy things to repeat themselves.” “No more they do,” thought Giles. But he could play up. “Is it all the same as last year?” “Exactly the same; but for the absence of Jules. Even your old friend madame Dumont survives and is eagerly awaiting your arrival.” “Still there, is she?” said Giles. “I’m not surprised. Unhappy things, at all events, repeat themselves.” “Oh,” laughed André, “your standard is too high.—I, more easily contented, should count the old lady a very amusing piece of bric-à-brac. We must have a furnished world, you know.—There is room for all sorts of oddities.” “No room at all, for that sort, in my world,” Giles returned.