“Not from me,” persisted Lory.
“Yes, from you. Suppose you had done what I asked you. Suppose you had not gone to the war again, what would have become of our lives?”
“Perhaps,” suggested Lory, “we have both to learn from each other. Perhaps it is a long lesson and will take all our lives. I think we are only beginning it. And perhaps I opened the book when I told you that I loved you, here in the verandah!”
Denise turned and looked at him with a smile full of pity, and touched with that contempt which women sometimes bestow upon men for understanding so little of life.
“Mon Dieu!” she said, “I loved you long before that.”
The sun was setting behind the distant Esterelles—those low and lonesome mountains clad from foot to summit in pine—when Mademoiselle Brun came out into the garden. She had to pass across the verandah, and instinctively turned to look towards that end of it where de Vasselot had come a second time to lie in the sun and heal his wounds—a man who had fought a good fight.
Denise was holding out a spray of heliotrope towards Lory and he had taken, not the flower, but her hand: and thus without a word and unconsciously they told their whole story to mademoiselle.
The little old woman walked on without showing that she had seen and understood. She was not an expansive person.
She sat down at the corner of the lowest terrace and with blinking eyes stared across the great plain of Les Arcs, where north and south meet, where the palm tree and the pine grow side by side, towards the Esterelles and the setting sun. The sky was clear, but for a few little puffs of cloud low down towards the west, like a flock of sheep ready to go home, waiting for the gate to open.
Mademoiselle's thin lips were moving as if she were whispering to the God whom she served with such a remarkable paucity of words. It may have been that she was muttering a sort of grim Nunc Dimittis—she who had seen so many wars. “Now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.”