“Manon—you mean? What would you have done——?”
She stared at the water, quite still, her lips pressed firmly together.
“I don’t know,” she said presently; “do not ask me to tell you.”
Paul Brent was much moved. He had been in such a confusion of remorse, self-accusation, loneliness and pain, that he had been capable of obeying any rash impulse that raised a cry of retrocession. For the moment the only possible future for him had seemed exile from Beaucourt. He would have to shoulder his knapsack and disappear. And then Manon had come to him, calm, practical and tender. She seemed to have touched him with a cool and soothing hand. There was nothing that he could not say to her or she to him.
“How you help a man,” he said.
She moved close to him and into the hollow of his arm, and they sat there under the poplar while the dusk came down, and the water grew dark and mysterious.
“You thought of running away, chéri?”
“Yes.”
“How much more cruel that would have been to me! What would people have said, and how humiliated I should have felt. I would rather you told the truth.”
“You are not afraid of it?”