She gave another and more vigorous push to the cart, looking at him with eyes that said, “What a simple fellow you are!” Brent turned about and put his weight on the shafts, and staring at the pavé in front of him, spent the whole of that journey in trying to disentangle her meaning.
During the unloading of the gig Brent watched Manon’s face as though he hoped to find it a mirror in which he could see the reflection of his own thoughts. But Manon’s face showed him nothing. She was the cheerfully determined little Frenchwoman wholly absorbed in helping him to unload those iron sheets. She refused to be sentimental or to let herself encourage Brent’s tendency towards too much self-consciousness. Men are such children, and Brent appeared to be an unusually sensitive child. He would go and get lost in the woods unless she held him shrewdly to the great work that mattered.
XV
After working at the huts till ten o’clock, Brent walked back to the Café de la Victoire by the light of the moon. He was tired, dead tired, but his weariness was full of a pleasant sense of physical satisfaction; he had done the best day’s work in his life, and if his hands were sore and his back one huge ache, what did it matter?
Manon had gone home earlier to light the stove. She heard Brent’s footsteps on the pavé, and ran out to meet him.
“Partner, I’m tired.”
He laughed over it, for he was a little exultant.
“I never thought that we could do it, rip off a hundred sheets and get them carted and stacked here. I have knocked half the weather boarding off that hut.”
Manon enveloped him in a soft atmosphere of sympathy, applause, gratitude.
“Go down and sit by the fire. The water is boiling. What shall it be, tea or coffee?”