She was terribly pale. Did she expect him not to have heard? Not to ask, since he knew? “Please, Alix,” he repeated; and then, once more, she bowed her head. “Well”—Giles did not know how he forced his voice along—“One more question. Will you tell me this—Is it André de Valenbois?” “Oh, Giles!” said Alix. She stopped short there in the wind, turned to him. The wind blew her hair across her face and mechanically she put up her hand and pushed it back while she gazed at him. “Oh, Giles!” she repeated, putting back the short tresses that whipped across her eyes and lips. “Can you ask me that?” Her face was like a beacon set against the storm, high in the sky. In its light he read all the monstrousness of what he had asked, and her hand, still holding back her hair, seemed to clear it for him so that he could receive the full illumination. As he read her look and saw the tears that suddenly welled up into her eyes, Giles, with an overwhelming lift of the heart, felt himself sobbing. “Forgive me! Forgive me, darling.—It was all that I could think.” “Oh, poor Giles,” she said brokenly. They were walking on, quickly now. Somewhere, near by, Giles was conscious of a great brightness approaching him. “I was horribly afraid. I could think of nobody else. And he loves you;—you see that.” “I see it.—Yes.—You have suffered.” “And though it seemed to me that you hated him;—it might not have prevented.” “Do not let us speak of it.—And she has suffered. You would think, would you not, that I would hate him more for what he has made her suffer.” Alix spoke with difficulty, in short breaths; and though the wind blew her hair backward, now that they again were breasting it, she still kept her hand up against her face, looking before her as she tried to tell him her difficult thoughts.—“Yet it is not so. It is not so,” she repeated. “I feel as if I understood it all.—It is so strange, Giles, all that I have had to understand in these last months. I seem to understand people like him and Maman.—They are helpless, Giles. They are like that.” “Oh, my darling!” said Giles. They went on side by side. The rain had begun to fall in great drops. On their tip of promontory they seemed poised between sky and sea, the marshalled chaos—above, below. And the brightness was spreading in Giles’s heart. “There is Allongeville,” said Alix. The town lay beneath them, half obliterated with the rain. “Let us run,” said Giles. “We can go into a shop.” “Or into the church,” said Alix. He put out his hand for hers and they started to run.