Paul had his ideal, his task.
“I’ll ask her to marry me when I have made the place good,” was his thought.
And Manon accepted this, even though she might have to face little humiliations in the acceptance. She kept her eyes on the man’s broad ideal. It was a big tree that would grow; it was strong, slow, hardy. If casual tongues dropped a few seeds of discord, of gossip, they were but little bitter weeds which the tree would smother.
“I love him,” she said to herself.
And Paul loved her with each nail he drove, each joist he fitted, each barrow-load he cleared from the place. He loved her in washing, in eating, in cutting wood for her stove, in looking at the white clouds sailing over the new roof, when it rained, when it blew, when the sun shone. She was in every corner of his life, and he in hers.
Sometimes he was greatly curious to know what that other man of hers had been, this Gaston Latour who had been killed early in the war. Manon had been married less than a year. She had a photo of her first husband somewhere, and one evening Paul asked to see the photo. Sometimes, he had an uncomfortable feeling that he was wearing a dead man’s shoes; he wondered, too, how he was filling them.
Manon took a candle down to the cellar, and brought back the photo.
“Gaston was a good fellow; we agreed quite well.”
Paul looked at the man’s picture. Gaston Latour had been one of those sickly Frenchmen, cold, pale and prominent of eye, with a big forehead and a weak beard. He stood with his hands resting on the back of a chair, staring straight in front of him.
Manon had been watching Paul’s face, and with a sudden, quick but quiet motion she took the photograph away from him. It is possible that a woman does not like to see her lover repelled by the face of the man who had first possessed her.