Suddenly André came down the steps of Les Chardonnerets. He had his cigarette and an odd bright smile was on his lips; yet as he approached he reminded Giles of the sails on the sea. André might still try to keep up appearances; but the wind was blowing him. But he was not going to keep up appearances. “So,” he said, “to-day is a day of destiny. You are not at all unconscious, are you, Giles? You have come to plead the cause of your laggard young friend the Englishman?” Well, was the thought that went through Giles, let him have it, then. “Why do you call him laggard?” he inquired, and he knew that the anger that boiled up in his breast was so violent that he could have struck André as he stood there. “Would you be eager to take into your family a young girl placed as Alix is placed?” André became very pale, but his eyes lighted. His sail scooped the sea. “Will you plead my cause with her if I say that I would?” he asked. Giles stood there, still; rooted to the ground. André had not meant to say that. Something in his own look had made him say it. It was the blow returned. “You don’t think of marrying Alix?” said Giles in a low voice. “I do,” André replied. “I think of it; now. It is my way out. Why should I retire when there is that way? Little as you could imagine it, I care for her enough.” “Care for her enough?” “Yes, if you like to put it so. You see where I stand. Don’t keep up pretences,” said André. “It’s come on slowly;—but it has me now and there is no escape.—_Elle est dans mon sang._—My family would have to submit;—and her mother’s consent I could gain;—to marriage.—Why do you look at me with that face? She does not love your Jerry. And in marrying me she would marry a man whose devotion to her mother would never waver. Don’t imagine,” said André, eyeing his friend, “that my devotion to Alix’s mother has wavered. It is altered; yes; that is inevitable; we have no power over these changes. But she will always remain for me the most generous, most admirable of women.” “You don’t see the hideousness of what you propose?” Giles felt his foundations tottering beneath him. André’s aspect, bright and baleful, seemed to tower above him like one of the darkly radiant clouds in the sky. And it was a thunderbolt he had launched. “I deplore a marked awkwardness,” he said. “Especially since Alix, I fear, has become aware of it. Your English plan of destroying the innocence of young girls has grave disadvantages. You will own that. But, in any case, hideousness is not a word I could connect with any project of mine.” “She’ll never take you! Never!” Giles cried. He felt himself trembling with the fury of his repudiation. “I can tell you that now. She would feel it as I do. She would see it as hideous.”