He combed his shock of dusty hair with a tortoise-shell comb he picked up from the carpet, and went downstairs, knapsack in hand. It was four o'clock. The dusty, foot-print and wheel-marked highway beyond the broken door in the garden-wall was strangely bare and lonely. The battalion he had marched with had bivouacked on the other side of the village. The troops that would presently follow were not yet upon the road.
The girl cried out that Monsieur's breakfast was ready. It had been laid, looking quite tempting, on one of the little inlaid tables that stood upon the tiny lawn. A truncheon of bread, fairly new, a pat of butter, two eggs, and a bowl of fragrant, steaming milk and coffee—such a meal as P. C. Breagh had not enjoyed for many a day.
He begged Angéle to share. She replied with a graceful wave of abnegation that she had already eaten. P. C. Breagh expressed regret, muttered his old Rockhampton grace and savagely fell to.
"Monsieur is Catholic?..."
The movement of his hand, making the sacred Sign, had not escaped her. He nodded, with his mouth full, and Angéle turned pale under her swarthy skin. Her guest vigorously beheaded an egg and reached for the coffee-bowl. The expression of the girl's eyes, as he lifted it to his mouth, brought something back to him. He sipped cautiously—recognized the French equivalent for English rat-poison—spat forth what he had taken, with a hideous grimace, and poured the deadly stuff out upon the ground.
Then he got up and looked for Angéle, whose white-frilled cap, crimson bodice, and striped stuff petticoat had vanished round the corner of the little hen-house. He could hear the klop-klop of her varnished cow-leather clogs receding along paths unknown.
Said P. C. Breagh, speaking with mouth awry, for the intense bitterness of the alkaloid had dried up tongue and palate:
"I'd like to follow that girl and shake her. But more than likely her sweetheart and male relatives are lurking in the neighborhood with pitchforks, to speed the unwelcome guest."
He went back to the breakfast-table, but the glamour had faded from the banquet, and the leathery dryness of mouth and throat foiled him in the effort to finish the egg he had begun. He pocketed the other, abandoned the bread and butter as unreliable, strapped on his dusty knapsack, and was hobbling away upon the sticks that had lately served him as crutches, when he caught sight of an obviously new coffin of thin tarred planking, on the gravel near the conservatory door. It bore a cross and an inscription roughly scrawled in letters of white paint:
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