A little boy on his mother’s lap ate chocolates, smearing his cheeks and palms. Clambering down, he was permitted, unchecked, to lurch towards Alix, staying himself on the knees he passed, and when he reached her he stretched forth his hand with assurance for the box of apricots she held. “_Est-il mignon!_” exclaimed the fond mother. But Alix did not even turn her eyes from the landscape. The disconcerted child stood gazing at her, too much astonished even to weep, and Giles, taking pity on him, offered the tick of his watch and jingled his bunch of keys in an attempt to distract his attention. But the little boy gave him no heed, and after a prolonged stare at Alix he made his way back to his mother; his first encounter, Giles imagined, with an unresponsive universe. “I say, you are really rather hard-hearted,” he remarked. Here was another difference, for neither Ruth nor Rosemary could have remained so impervious to even such a repulsive little boy. But Alix said: “I cannot look at a dirty face like that. If his mother had cleaned his face, I would have given him one.” “Well, since he’s gone back to her, and you needn’t look at him, may I give him one?” said Giles; and, as Alix smiling, assented, Giles handed an apricot to the little boy, who took it without thanks and ate it, staring solemnly at Alix the while. A thin blue crescent of sea cut into the fields on the right. In the distance, on a rise of country, a pale pink château stood with wings of sculptured woodland on either side, a long green lawn in front. “It cannot be far now,” said Alix. The lady with the scarf, the mother with the little boy, the stout marketing lady, had all left them by now and she could open her window and stand by it to look out. “Vaudettes is four miles from the station. Maman will come to meet us, with monsieur de Maubert.” “Who is monsieur de Maubert?” asked Giles. He had never heard the name before. But then he had never heard any names connected with Maman. How could he, since he never spoke of her? “He is an old friend of ours; a very old friend,” said Alix. “I do not remember the time when we did not know monsieur de Maubert.” “You like him?” “Oh, very much. _C’est un homme fort distingué_,” said Alix, relapsing into French, with the effect, to Giles, of not sparing more than convention for their conversation. Her thoughts were fixed in anticipation. He could almost see her palpitate in her stillness with it. She might have been kinder to the little boy had she not been so unaware of everything but the approaching figure of Maman. “How distinguished?” Giles, however, persisted. “Oh, I am so ignorant, Giles. Wise things do not interest me, you know.” Alix smiled slightly down at him over her shoulder. “He has excavated cities; Persian; Mongolian;—_que sais-je_. He writes on antiquities. He has a beautiful _appartement_ in Paris with collections of gems and bronzes. He is at once _savant_ and _homme du monde_.”