“It’s our Madeleine,” he said quietly.
Madeleine kissed him and told him to fetch her box in the morning, from “Seven Chimneys.”
He said, “Thy room is empty,” and went into the kitchen, while she said a word to Berthe. It was true, her little room was just as she had left it a year before. She noted the fact with quiet satisfaction, but did not bother over the significance of it—over the fact that her father, who usually paid so little heed to anything that went on in the house, had kept her room untouched and empty for her. She quietly accepted the fact, conscious that he felt that neither the God to whom he muttered prayers on Sunday, nor the various temporal powers whom he obeyed, when he had to, on weekdays, really understood him or cared for him as his younger daughter did. She sat down with him, in the dim kitchen, to the evening meal, by the light of the day that was dying in thin drizzle and incessant mutter of guns. Once some fearful counter-barrage made the old panes of the oriel window rattle, and the old man said:
“It’s a swine of a war, all the same!”
Madeleine replied: “It’s something new for them to be bombarded in Hazebrouck!”
“I’m going to take the money out of the Savings Bank,” he commented. In his mind, unused to the facilities of bookkeeping, and cradled in the cult of the worsted stocking for savings, he probably thought of his money as being held in notes or coin in the stoutly-barred vault behind the Mairie. After a long pause, during which he surveyed her hands, busy with household mending, somewhat neglected since Marie had relinquished it to Berthe, he spoke again:
“You are quite a fine lady of the town!”
“That will soon pass,” she answered, without ceasing to ply her needle.
Later he said: “You know Marie has returned to Laventie?”
Madeleine nodded. The remark was not so stupid as it sounded. He knew she knew the fact. It was his way of appealing to her.