“I want to look again at Bibi’s house.”
Her watch told her that she would have to be on the march in half an hour, and there was the washing up to be done. She was not going to leave Paul with a lot of dirty crockery.
“You can heat up the meat and the vegetables for another meal,” she told him, “and perhaps you know how to fry eggs.”
“I can boil them and judge the time,” laughed Paul.
When Manon was ready for the road, Brent walked with her by way of the Rue de Picardie to look at the Hôtel de Paris. The place, standing as it did at the cross-roads, had suffered badly from shell-fire, and the ragged walls rose out of a deplorable chaos of rubbish—old iron and broken brick. It had been a biggish building, and Brent saw that the house had gathered itself round the great central mass of brickwork in which were the chimney flues, a mass of brickwork that stood like a lonely tower in the middle of the ruin. The main beams of the roof and floors had taken their bearings from this central tower. The staircase had curled round it, and in any reconstructive scheme this mass of brickwork would serve as a point d’appui.
Brent climbed over the rubbish and examined the chimney-stack with the eyes of an expert. There was a great crack running up one side of it, a crack that spread upwards from a raw chasm at the base of the mass where a shell had exploded. A good third of the foundations had been blown away, and the whole pile seemed to balance itself precariously on the edge of the shell crater.
Manon had followed Brent over the heaps of brick.
“Look at that,” and he pointed at Louis Blanc’s chimney-stack.
“It seems ready to fall.”
Brent was frowning.