How clearly he could see her still, with her brooding brightness, her soft gloom. He could not see her as baleful; he could not see her as guilty; he only saw her walking there secure in power and loveliness. And this was the irrelevance, the tormenting discrepancy; for she was the woman who had taken Owen from Toppie; she was the woman who, after her lover’s death, had placidly made use of what assets he had left her; his family; and its trust in him and her. And she was the more baleful to him from the fact that, though he remembered her so vividly and knew such portentous things about her, herself he did not know at all. There was one thing about her, however, that he could and ought to know at once, and the thought of it worked its way up into his mind while he and Alix leaned there. They had never again spoken of their secret, but, before he met her mother he ought to know whether Alix had told her what he knew of Owen’s stays with them in Paris. Before he saw madame Vervier he ought to know what she knew about him; and suddenly, his eyes fixed upon the wharves and houses of Dieppe, he said: “You think she’ll feel it all right that I’m come?” “I wrote to her that you were coming,” said Alix. Her mind had perhaps been following some train of thought not far removed from his, for she spoke as if they were continuing a theme rather than taking it up. “She will be delighted.” “Will she? Look here, Alix”—Giles gazed down over the railing at the sea—“she couldn’t be delighted, I take it, if she knew that I had a grievance about my brother on her account.” He had spoken very abruptly, yet he had, he felt, put it well. In the little pause that followed his words, he was pleased with himself for having found any so colourless and unprovocative. “What we know of your brother,” said Alix after her pause, “would not give her a grievance against you; only against him.” “Against him?” “Did he not deceive her, too?” “Deceive her? Oh, I see. You think he didn’t tell her that he’d kept us in the dark?” “He could not have told her, Giles; if that is really what you are asking me.” Giles, a little confused, retraced his steps. “What I’m really asking you is whether _you’ve_ told her. I want to know where I stand with her. Haven’t you felt that she ought to be told?” Again Alix was silent, and for a longer time. Then she said: “It has been my great perplexity. She does not know. Of course she does not know. But I wrote to her at once, that time last Winter, and begged that I might come home; and when I found she could not have me, I thought it best to say nothing then. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps you will blame me, Giles. But I thought it best to wait. It will give her such pain when she knows.”