Carolan clenched his hands in jealous misery, and she looked back at him to say:
"I do know it! To-day you placed yourself between me and the violence of those Prussians. I have no words to thank you for your courage, sir! Had I words for him"—she looked back at my "cousin"—"he would not hear them.... Nor can he be sensible of this——" She stooped and kissed the dead man's forehead between the boldly arching eyebrows. "Yet with all my gratitude I place it there!"
P. C. Breagh said, flushing scarlet to his hair-roots: "I would change places with him to get that—and I believe you know it! Cover him up and let me take you away from here...." He added, as she looked at him in breathless questioning, "Somewhere where you'll be safe. There must be somewhere!"
"Until night comes to cover us," she told him, "we are more safe here than anywhere. You do not think the comrades of those savage men who made this scene of desolation would halt in passing to ravage a plundered nest?"
"But here ... you can't stay here ... in all this—beastliness."
His gesture of repugnance was as forcible as the word.
She thought, and said as the outward shadows lengthened, and a deep red sunset streamed through the shattered window-panes:
"Behind the house there is a little cabane ... I should say, 'a shed,' where Madame kept her firewood. We will hide ourselves in there until the dark. For what are you looking?"
He answered, stirring the débris on the flagstones:
"For a comb and a razor for choice, out of my knapsack. No!... Except the rags of a spare jacket—they've left me nothing but this."