“You can give them to me; I will lock them up in the box I have at Marie Castener’s. And now that I know everything, it seems nothing.”
Brent was looking through the gateway at the ruins of the village.
“You are very generous,” he said. “We will see what Beaucourt makes of me. If it accepts me as a good sort of fellow, it may ask no questions. It is about time I got back to work on the roof.”
They walked back to the house, and before he climbed the ladder, Brent went down into the cellar and returned with the battered brown Army Book and the identity disc. He gave them to Manon.
“There is my pledge.”
“It shall always be honoured,” she answered him, slipping them into her blouse.
XXIII
Half an hour before dusk Anatole Durand started up the engine of his car, and glanced round for Manon, who had been putting on her cloak. Durand saw in this delay a loitering of lovers, nor had he any quarrel with a romance that seemed part of the soul of the new Beaucourt. “If I am loved by the young,” was one of his sayings, “the old can hate me as much as they please.” His protest was a mild bleat on the horn, and a jab at the accelerator that set the engine roaring for a couple of seconds. He had a side glimpse, as he turned the car, of Manon and Paul coming out of the doorway of the Café de la Victoire, Paul’s blue trousers very close to Manon’s black and white check skirt. There was an indescribable nearness about their figures, and yet just a little space between them, that magnetic space that separates the hearts of lovers who have not confessed.
Manon was saying something to Paul. She looked across at Durand.
“I am coming, monsieur.”