“Why not?”
“You haven’t any servants nor any furniture nor things to cook with.”
He laughed.
“Oh! I am an old campaigner,” he assured her. “I meant to pick up a few oddments in the village. I don’t suppose I shall stay very long, anyhow, but I thought I’d like to have a look at the place. By-the-by, what sort of a man is Mr. Fentolin?”
Again there was that curious expression in her eyes, an expression almost of secret terror, this time not wholly concealed. He could have sworn that her hands were cold.
“He met with an accident many years ago,” she said slowly. “Both his legs were amputated. He spends his life in a little carriage which he wheels about himself.”
“Poor fellow!” Hamel exclaimed, with a strong man’s ready sympathy for suffering. “That is just as much as I have heard about him. Is he a decent sort of fellow in other ways? I suppose, anyhow, if he has really taken a fancy to my little shanty, I shall have to give it up.”
Then, as it seemed to him, for the first time real life leaped into her face. She leaned towards him. Her tone was half commanding, half imploring, her manner entirely confidential.
“Don’t!” she begged. “It is yours. Claim it. Live in it. Do anything you like with it, but take it away from Mr. Fentolin!”
Hamel was speechless. He sat a little forward, a hand on either knee, his mouth ungracefully open, an expression of blank and utter bewilderment in his face. For the first time he began to have vague doubts concerning this young lady. Everything about her had been so strange: her quiet entrance into the carriage, her unusual manner of talking, and finally this last passionate, inexplicable appeal.