“Le bon Dieu vous garde,” she said.
She put on her coat, picked up her little bag, and was ready to go. The brown dog looked at them both, and then made up his mind to escape with the woman. Brent went with her as far as the yard gate.
“Au revoir, monsieur.”
“Bon chance,” he said with a cracked smile.
He watched the little black figure disappear round the angle of the big stone house that jutted out across the end of the Rue Romaine on the way to Bonnière.
“Damned plucky,” he said aloud; “she ought to have gone long ago.”
Brent went back to the garden and the place where Manon had buried her treasure. The patch of raw earth was too noticeable and too obvious, in spite of the weeds she had trampled into it, and Brent looked about for something with which to camouflage it. The smashed walls and the scattered stones offered a suggestion. The main mass of the débris lay close to the spot that Manon Latour had chosen, and Brent set about re-arranging those stones with an art that aped reality. The pattern he made pretended that the shell had struck the wall at a slight angle, and his casual dotting of the outlying fragments made the trick quite convincing. The raw earth was covered; no one would trouble to go poking about there. He completed the job by smudging out the letters he had printed on the wall, using a bit of broken stone and the sleeve of his tunic.
“Bon,” he said; “Tom would never have touched the girl’s money. There was no dirt on Tom.”
Brent collected a pick from one of the outhouses, appropriated Manon’s spade, and returned to the orchard above the stream. This orchard belonged to Manon Latour; so did the meadow below it, and a strip of woodland on the other side of the little valley. Brent took off his tunic, hung it on the stump of the apple tree and began to dig. The red wine had flushed and heartened him, but it was food he needed, and the sting of the wine soon wore off. Sweat ran from him; the sweat of exhaustion; he panted and nearly fell forward over his spade when he had lifted the first layer of sods.
He sat down on the bank, and putting his head between his knees, remained thus for some minutes. The faintness passed. The spirit reasserted itself and coerced the body.