Alix felt that it was not his work. Giles, too, had had a blow; and he was angry with her; darkly, heavily angry; why she could not tell. Only her heart swelled with a suffocating sense of resentment and of tears. She did not go to the study next morning. She had thought and thought in the night, and she saw now that if Giles knew something that she knew, he also knew something she did not know. She was afraid of Giles and his knowledge; afraid of what they might have to say to each other. And she was angry with him, too, for making her afraid. Pain, dark and mysterious, pain that seemed to have come to her from his eyes, pressed upon her. And it made her think of the suffering that Grand-père’s eyes had conveyed; and of Maman. What she feared was that he would speak to her of Maman. She did not go; but Giles came to her. She was curled up in her scarf on the sofa in the cold drawing-room, and it made her think of the time that she had waited at Victoria and Giles had been so late. He was not late now; he was early; and he said at once, making no pretence about it: “Come, please, I want to talk to you.” She had felt herself angry with Giles, because of the injustice of his anger towards herself; but as she faced him in the study, the grey January morning outside the window, the gas-fire creaking in its dismal mirth in the grate, her anger went down. She felt pity for him. He, too, had not slept; he, too, had had a horrible night; and if he looked at her thus sternly it was, she saw, more because he was suffering than because he was angry. He stood before her, his hands thrust deeply in his pockets, and what he said was: “Look here, Alix, were you lying last night?” Astonishment almost bereft her of breath. Lying? Could he have thought it possible that she was not lying? Could he have thought it possible—turning it over and over in his mind during the night—that she did not know about Captain Owen’s leaves? It flashed across her that, if she could find another lie, now, for him, and say that she had not been lying, he might believe her. He would have no knowledge with which to contradict that lie. But, while she looked at him, feeling her face getting whiter and whiter, what strangely came to her was that she could not lie to Giles. It was better to share whatever pain there was to be shared with him than to be shut out, with her lie, in loneliness, if in safety. So, keeping her eyes on him, in a steady voice she said: “Yes. I was lying.” Giles at this contemplated her for a long time and it seemed to be with deep thoughtfulness rather than with any other feeling. “Why?” he said at last. “How could I not?” asked Alix. “How could you not?—You can invent such a story, in every detail, and then come and ask me how not? What in Heaven’s name do you mean?” said Giles. “Have you no sense of truth?”