"'Madame!...'"
She had nearly betrayed the truth, but she nipped her stern upper lip close down upon its rosy fellow.... Was she not married? Nearly, if not quite....
So nearly that until M. Charles appeared with Madame, she would maintain the character of a recent bride. It would be better not to rekindle in the gray eyes of Monica's brother that fire that had blazed there so fiercely a few hours before.
LXII
How strangest of the strange, to love a person so nearly a stranger!... What had Monica's brother been thinking of? In January they had met, and parted coldly ... in August they had met again, and had spent together not quite three days.... But what days! to brand themselves upon the memory. After that morning on the bloody field of Gravelotte—that night spent in the woodshed behind the cottage of Madame Guyot—that gray dawn when they had walked, hand clasped in hand, behind the bearer of the Blessed Sacrament, could He and She be ever anything but friends?... Close friends ... dear comrades, linked by indissoluble bonds of memories ... of perils shared, of experiences unforgettable by both.... What would Life be like when one had to face it shorn of the sympathy and companionship of Monica's brother?... Juliette did not dare to question. The thought of such loneliness was enough to freeze the heart.
Meanwhile, here was Madame Potier, heated and triumphant, proclaiming Madame served with the best that could be got. A lentil soup—an omelette with ham, coffee, and fruit from the garden. One would do better later, let Madame only wait.... The apartment of Madame Tessier had been got ready for Madame ... the small room usually occupied by M. Charles might be prepared for the Belgian gentleman.... Or—since that room was dismantled for cleaning purposes, and Madame Potier herself occupied the apartment adjoining ... would Monsieur mind sleeping at the garden cottage? She would guarantee there cleanliness and more than comfort.... Was not the bedroom hers and her poor Potier's?... Had they not slept in that bed for ten years past?... Ah, wherever her poor Potier might now be sleeping, he would never find the equal of his own bed....
The proposal, possibly prompted by discretion on the part of the excellent Madame Potier, was gratefully accepted by Breagh. And from that hour, under the sheltering wing of the hectic little caretaker, began a little idyll of happiness for two young people, who asked nothing better than that it should last.
It was exquisite autumn weather. They rose early, and passed out of the iron gate together, and so through the quiet streets to Mass at the great church of Notre Dame in the Rue St. Genevieve. Or they would attend it at the Chapel in the Convent of Carmelites that is now the Petit College in conjunction with a colossal Lycée. Then they would come back to déjeuner, laid on a table under the trees on the lawn, and afterward they would work in the garden, or read, or talk. But they read no newspapers, and for the best part of two months they never exchanged a word about the War.
It was the treatment devised by P. C. Breagh, who had failed of his practicing degree in Medicine, and under this régime the shadow that had rested upon Juliette lifted day by day. He had taken Madame Potier into his confidence, and she entered into a conspiracy for the better nourishing of one whom she firmly believed to be the wife of her master. She dragooned Juliette into drinking a vast quantity of milk, and the girl's haggard outlines began to fill out, and her dreadful dreams ceased to haunt her. Sleep returned, strength revived, her grief for the lost father, unassuaged, became less poignant. She could look back upon the happiness of their old life together without the anguish that rends the heart.