Giles’s back was turned to her as he sat before the fire. She could not see his face as he went on: “Yes, Toppie. They were engaged. They loved each other. You’ve seen what Toppie feels about him now. He is her past and he is her present; and her future, too. There’s nobody in the world for her but him. Well. That’s it. Can you imagine Toppie, while he was away in France, seeing as much of another man as Owen saw of your mother?” Alix sat staring at the back of Giles’s head. “She was not alone; in a strange country. Why should he not find a little peace and happiness with a friend?” “Yes, I know. That seems all right. But why didn’t he come home and see Toppie? He could have managed to get one leave for England, instead of three for Paris; almost certainly, if he’d wanted to. And put all that aside. The worst thing of all, the thing that would shatter Toppie’s life if she could know it, is that he kept quiet about the last two leaves, and never wrote to any of us that he’d been with you and your mother for the first. What would Toppie feel if she could know that? I ask you.” “You mean,” said Alix, pressing her forehead on her hands and staring, now, down at the table, “that he cared most for Maman?” “Doesn’t it look like it?” She tried to think. “He would have come back to Toppie after the war. It was perhaps because of the war. He did not know, those times he came to us, that it was the end.” The new, strange shapes of things Giles had set before her were mingling irrefutably with all her memories, and the memory of last night returned to her. Captain Owen and Maman on either side of the fire. Captain Owen’s dwelling eyes. How much he had cared for Maman! Oh, how much! And, trying to answer her own thoughts, she went on: “Maman did not care most for him. I do not think so. She cared very much. His death was a great blow. But so many people care for Maman. He could have come back to Toppie; Maman would not have kept him.” When she had said this, it was as if the silence between her and Giles was altered in its quality. He said nothing for so long a time that the echoes of her own words began to sing in her head like brazen bells. They were true words. Yet they did not ring true. Long before Giles spoke, she wished she had not said them. “And you think,” he said, “that Toppie would have cared to marry a man who hadn’t been kept from marrying her?” How dreadful was Giles’s voice. Dark and heavy, as his eyes had been last night. “No; no, Giles. I do not mean that. I am sorry. Not that. It was of Maman I was thinking. You think of Toppie and I think of Maman; the ones we love most. No; I see that she would not have married him.”