Now Manon was strangely touched by that glimpse of him. She was smiling, but there was a little shimmer of tenderness in her smile.
“Mon ami, I would have done that for you. But it is rather sweet seeing you playing the blanchisseuse.”
When she came down the hill into the Rue de Picardie she noticed that the shell-holes in the walls of the house had disappeared. Two neat new patches of brickwork had been put in, and Brent had used facing bricks of the same colour as the walls of the house so that the new work was hardly noticeable. He had got the bedding-plates into place along the tops of the walls. Between one of the end gables and the inverted V of the main partition wall a length of timber hung suspended in the air by two lengths of telephone wire, some ingenious contraption of Brent’s for overcoming the problem of how a man could be in two places at the same time.
“Paul, hallo!”
He came through the old blue door in the garden wall, and stood a moment, looking down at her from the raised path. He had not expected her. The surprise and the pleasure of it were as obvious as the blue sky.
“What!—You have walked?”
“Yes.”
And suddenly she was aware of a new shyness in Paul Brent. He was looking at her as a man only looks at a woman when she has become the most wonderful thing in the world. He came down from the path and took her bundle.
“You have carried this from Ste. Claire?”
His shyness spread to Manon. She laughed. The feeling was rather exquisite, a little shiver of delight, the first note of a bird on a soft spring morning.