They had gone for a long way in silence. A light breeze met them, now that they had rounded a headland, and the thin panels of madame Vervier’s dress were blown backward as she went. Goddess-like as he had always felt her, there was something disembodied, unearthly in her aspect now. It was as if, gliding through sad Elysian fields, beautiful, changeless, with gazing eyes, she contemplated the sorrows of the past. Yet her voice, as she spoke again, was not the voice of an Elysian spirit. He recognized as he heard it that a bitter humanity still beat at the heart of her confidences and that her tranquillity was not the shining of an inner peace, but a shield proudly worn. What she had to tell him was the thing most difficult to tell; the thing that throbbed and echoed in her, as the scar of the severed limb burns and remembers; and all her voice was altered as she spoke of it. “There were further reasons,” she repeated, turning her face away from him to the sea. “He knows that it is best to go, since to remain would be to love Alix.” And through all his fear, Giles saw it now; he had clung to the hope that it was an ugly dream. He measured, in a sense of physical sickness, the difference between an ugly dream and reality as in madame Vervier’s words his dread was made close and palpable. “But isn’t that impossible?” It was his English voice that asked the question. His French understanding knew that it was possible. “Why so?” madame Vervier’s French voice returned. All the acquiescence of her race spoke in it. “Alix is exquisite.” Alix’s face swam before Giles. “But she is your daughter.” “That would offend his taste. That does offend it. That is one of the reasons, as I have said, for his consent to our parting. It is not a reason, if he stayed, that could repress his heart.” “Couldn’t Alix be trusted to do that?” Giles asked after a moment. He must ask it. He must approach, in order to know whether madame Vervier saw it, too, the deepest fear of all. And with what a complex thankfulness he heard in her reply that Alix’s secret was safe with him. It did not exist for madame Vervier’s imagination even. A deep, strange bitterness spoke in her voice as she said: “Her dislike of him is an added attraction.” “Her dislike of him? Does she dislike him?” “Surely you have seen it. As if by instinct. Always. From the first. It is an added attraction,” madame Vervier repeated; and with a little laugh, more bitter than her voice, she said: “It is the first time in his life that André has found himself disliked by a woman.”