They were walking, Alix between them, to the car outside and he could glance at her. Rather than the constraint he had guessed at it was now the cold dignity of complete self-mastery her profile showed him. He knew that she had smiled at him—and had it not been with her old sweetness?—when he had greeted her; but he felt, as they went thus together, he, she, and André, that chasms lay between him and Alix. Seas lay between them; race and tongue. Her voice came back to him as she had said, last year when he had found her again, “But I am French.” Only it was so much more now just that old difference. Her calm could not hide from him how much more it was that lay between them. And what did it hide from André? How was it possible, if deep instinct or the new knowledge of her mother’s life had not armed her against him, that she should not love him? Jerry was a boy beside him; beside the power of André’s beautifully possessed, beautifully balanced experience, Jerry would always seem a boy. He remembered, snatching still at hope, that Alix had found such completeness _agaçant_; but then she might not really like him even now. It might be some helpless hereditary strain that had brought her, her young heart proudly pruned of its first happy buddings, under the spell of the love that monsieur de Maubert had defined on the distant Summer day; the love that burns itself out and that may have nothing to do with liking. She had said no word as yet, but as they emerged into the sunny _place_ she remarked that she had to buy a _baba-au-rhum_ for tea and asked André to drive them across to the _pâtissier’s_. “Alix is sad,” André observed when she had disappeared into the little shop, where cakes blandly masked in chocolate, cakes touched with rosettes of pistachio, cakes crusted over their glitter with crisp nuts, were placed enticingly on crystal stands in the window. “Her cat was run over yesterday by a motor. The very ugly cat;—you know him well, of course. It was an instantaneous death, but her mother says that she takes it much to heart. _Elle a un gros chagrin_,” said André. “Poor Blaise dead.—Oh, I’m sorry,” said Giles. But he drew a dim comfort from the news. There might be other and more childish reasons for Alix’s aloofness. He knew how remote and stern she could look when controlling tears.