How strange, how tortuous, how self-contradictory was the human heart, Giles thought, walking beside his unhappy friend. With all her passionate maternal love he felt, thrilling in her tone, a resentment against her child that she should be indifferent to the charm that had so subjugated herself. Giles felt it cruel to ask the further question that came to him, yet he wondered if she had not, often, asked it of herself. “He consents to go, then, because he is hopeless?” She had, indeed, often asked it. He heard that in her voice as she answered: “Oh—do not let us deprive him of all merit!” They had reached by now a further promontory of the cliff and looked over a long stretch of the coast, pale blue sea, pale cliffs, a delicate distant finger of the land running out, against the horizon, with a tiny lighthouse upon it. A bench was set amidst the grass before this view and madame Vervier sank down upon it as if exhausted. Giles sat on the grass at her feet and for a little while they surveyed the azure scene in silence. “And now,” said madame Vervier, and he heard that she gathered her thoughts from dark broodings, “let us speak no more of me, but of Alix.—Of Alix and Jerry. For you like this Jerry. It is because of him that you have come.” “Yes. It’s because of him. I like him very much.” Giles looked down at the grass. “I saw him before I left. All that he asks is to marry her at once.” “Ah, he loves her, I know. He is an honourable young Englishman and he loves her. That is what I have gone upon from the beginning. It is not Jerry who is the difficulty. It is Alix.” “We must give her time, you see,” Giles murmured. “Her pride had such a blow.”