"But can you sleep there?" she asked, still shocked that she had not realised what this journey was to him.
"Can I?"
"I mean is the house ruined?"
"Oh, the house is in bad order," he said. "Not ruined. 'Looted,' my old concierge writes. She was my nurse a hundred years ago. She has been there through the occupation. I wrote to her, and she expects me to-night. To-night it will be too dark, but to-morrow before I leave I shall see what they have done to the factories."
"Don't you know at all how bad they are?"
"I've had letters. The agent went on ahead five days ago and he has settled there already. But letters don't tell one enough. There are little things in the factories—things I put in myself—" He broke off and drew her to another side of the plateau. "See down there! That unfortunate railway crosses two more bridges. I can't see now, but they're blown up, since all the others are. And such a time for business! It hurts me to think of the things I can't set going till that railway works. Every one is crying out for the things that I can make here."
On and on he talked in his excitement, absorbed and planning, leading her from one point of view on the plateau to another. Her eyes followed his pointing hands from crest to crest of the mountains their neighbours, till the valleys were full of creeping shadows. Even when the shades filmed his eager hand he held it out to point here and there as though the whole landscape of the mountains was printed in immortal daylight on his mind.
"I can't see," she said. "It's so dark down there. I can't see it," as he pointed to the spot where the Brussels railway once ran.
"Well, it's there," he said, staring at the spot with eyes that knew.
The blue night deepened in the sky; from east, west, north, south, sprang the stars.