“I see no alteration at all,” said Giles grimly, his eye turning on madame Collet, who murmured a low word of protest to her mother. But madame Dumont was not to be curbed. She leaned from the chaise and laid her lean hand in its black silk mitt on Giles’s arm. “_Il l’a lachée_,” she said in a harsh whisper. “_Il va se marier._” “Maman; Maman,” madame Collet urgently whispered, casting a helpless glance at Giles. “You must not thus repeat gossip about our friend. Monsieur Gilles will not know what to think of you. Do not heed her, Monsieur.—She is so very old.” “What are these manners! To whom are you speaking! Old! I am old, indeed, if I must thus accept impertinences from my daughter!” Madame Dumont thundered, turning a terrible glance upon her child. “_Mais Maman, Maman, je ne veux pas vous offenser!_” Giles heard poor little madame Collet plead as he hastily muttered an adieu and fled from them. In the door he nearly collided with mademoiselle Blanche. If madame Vervier was altered, mademoiselle Blanche was more so. Suddenly, looking at her chalk-white mask, glittering there in the sunlight, Giles saw the catastrophe that had befallen them all with a cruel sharpness that the side-issues of a situation may sometimes display more cuttingly than its centre. In mademoiselle Blanche’s face he read that any reversionary hopes she might have cherished were withered. It was not to her that André had turned. He would never turn to her. He had been sorry for monsieur de Maubert, sitting in his patch of sunlight; and he was sorry now for mademoiselle Blanche. She had a brilliant smile for him. Her scarlet mouth made him feel sick. He promised her, did he not, to have tea with them one day. Giles said he was afraid he had only a very little time to spend at Les Chardonnerets this year. “You have come to take mademoiselle Alix from us again?” smiled mademoiselle Blanche, the cold flame of her eye traversing him, so that he saw again, in a direful flash of prescience, that in old age her eye would be like her grandmother’s. “You once more carry off our lovely little Persephone?” How mademoiselle Blanche desired that he would! The fear that circled round Giles fastened a tentacle in his heart as he saw how mademoiselle Blanche, all hopeless as she must be, feared Alix’s presence. “I’m afraid not; I’m afraid I shall have to leave her where she wants to be—with her mother,” he said, feeling a slow red mount to his face as he saw all the things in mademoiselle Blanche that she did not want him to see. For one strange shuffling moment the pretences between them fell, and mademoiselle Blanche looked hard at him, looked as one human being may look at another, with deep inquiry and surmise. Then, murmuring a hasty farewell, she fled, a white marionette, down the path between the nasturtiums. CHAPTER VII