That was it. He understood that it might have given her so much pleasure and Ruth and Rosemary didn’t understand that at all. And he wanted her to have gone because he wanted her to have pleasure. He was like Maman in that. She confessed. “Yes, I did. But not so much that I could miss you and our dance. The dance was planned for me, Giles.” Giles rubbed his hand through his hair.—His mother should have corrected him of that trick, though Alix rather liked to see him do it; it left his hair very much on end. “It’s decent of you; awfully decent of you. But you wanted to go, of course, you dear little kid. And I’d like to think you were to get a wider look at England than you get with us.” “I think she will ask me again, Giles. Your mother wrote and explained it to her and she wrote back and said it must be for another time. I think she likes me,” said Alix. “And I like her, too. Though Ruth and Rosemary find her empty-headed. Perhaps it is empty-headed people that I do like,” Alix smiled. “Perhaps I am empty-headed myself.” “I saw you took to each other. I saw you belonged with each other,” Giles mused. “I’m awfully sorry you didn’t go.” “Would you rather I were staying with her than here with you, Giles?” “No; I’d rather you were staying here. But I’d like you to have a slice of cake now and then after all the thick bread-and-butter. Now you, of course, would like to have the cake all the time,” and Giles smiled at her, summoning her to confess to her frivolity. But when he asked her like that, there in the study, with the gas-fire and the untidy heaped books and the Greek temples and the foolish animals on the mantelpiece, Alix did not feel so sure. She liked Lady Mary. She loved the balm she wafted. She felt sure that no one here would appreciate her white taffeta; they would think Ruth’s pink silk ninon with the embroidered edges just as pretty. But there would not, she felt even surer, be any one at Cresswell Abbey who would understand as Giles did. PART II CHAPTER I “_C’est la France_,” said Alix. She leaned beside him on the railing of the Channel steamer and looked through the blue of the July day to where the town thinly shaped itself, like a line of grey-white shells floating between sea and sky. Her phrase was spoken in a tone of quiet statement, unstressed by any emotion, yet Giles, while they watched the shore together, felt its echoes stretching back revealingly into the past and out towards the future.