She smiled bravely.
“Oh, I do not give up hope. Some day he will return. I pray to God each night and morning, when I work and when I eat.”
“Please God he will,” said Brent, and found that he had uttered a prayer.
The girl insisted on Paul going back to her home, a little red farm among poplars on the green slope of a hill above the windings of a river. Jean’s father and mother lived there, two quiet people to whom life had left but little to say. They were very kind to Paul, and he passed the night at the farm, sleeping in a feather bed in a narrow room whose window showed him the stars hanging in the bare branches of an old apple tree. There was the smell of home about the place, the home of the Frenchman who had not returned. Brent felt that the little house watched and listened with every window, its gables cocked like the ears of a dog waiting for its master.
Brent was touched by the kindness these poor people showed him. They sent him upon his way with a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some apples in his pockets, and a sense of the essential goodness of the humbler folk who suffer. The girl went with him to the gate opening upon the road.
“Bon voyage.”
Her soft eyes and her sadness put new life into Brent.
“May he return—very soon,” he said; “your husband; perhaps I have brought you good luck.”
She watched Brent march off down the road, and his going made her yearn all the more deeply for the other man who had not returned.
“Four years,” he said, “four years of his youth—and of mine.”