“Give her time! I would give her anything!” madame Vervier exclaimed. “But I can do nothing with Alix.”—_Rien! rien! rien!_ she said in French with a crescendo of grief and impatience almost comic to his ear for all its pathos. “You have altered my Alix for me, you English, Giles. You have given her a different heart. It is strange, strange to me—and bitter—to feel how changed she is. She loves me. More than ever. She has guessed everything, and she loves me more than ever; but with a love almost maternal; a love terribly mature. I could not have believed it possible in so short a time that a child should grow to womanhood. She is docile, still; obedient; but she does not deceive me;—it is only in the little things—the things that do not count. If, in the great things, she would obey, nothing need be lost. There is now only a _rangée_ mother to explain, to efface, to avoid.—How easy I would make it for my Alix to avoid me if her happiness demanded it!—But, no; she will not hear me. She is a stone to my supplications. She denies that she has ever loved him. She takes her life into her own hands and says that she will never marry, that she will stay with me always and be happy so. I dash myself against a rock in Alix. More than that;—she watches me; she suspects me—as if I were the daughter—_bon Dieu_!—and she the mother!—I wrote to Jerry. I told him to come;—it was but the other day.—I told him that it was best that they should meet, and that I would help him. And Alix intercepted the letter. Yes;—you may well stare. She confronted me with it and tore it in two before my eyes. She told me she knew too well what I had said to Jerry and that she had herself written and that all was over between them. Cold! Stern!—I could hardly believe it was my little Alix.—She spoke as if I had done her a great wrong.—As if I were the child and she the mother,” madame Vervier repeated, a note of bewilderment mingling with the grief of her tone; and, indeed, as she made him these ingenuous confidences, Giles saw her as the child, the tricking child; all the French rôles reversed and Alix sustained in hers by what England had given her. No wonder madame Vervier was bewildered. “But that was very wrong of you,” he said, as he might have said to the child. “You had no right to do that.” “No right! I, her mother, am to sit by with folded hands and watch her ruin herself! Those are your English ideas. Those are the ideas that Alix has made hers. She, too, said I had no right. As if a mother’s right over her child’s life were not supreme!” “We don’t think it is, you see. Not when the child has reached Alix’s age. You don’t want her to marry a man she does not love.”