“I was that English soldier, madame. Shall I prove it?”
“Yes.”
He went and groped in the cellar for his boots, and sitting on the top step, laced them on, while Manon Latour waited in the passage. A little widow who has kept a café, and has had half the men in the village in love with her, cannot but know something of man and of the very obvious habits of the creature. Also, a pretty woman who has a head on her shoulders is apt to get very bored with the perennial fools. They all tell the same tale; they all want the same reward. Manon had grown fastidious.
But this man puzzled her from the very beginning. What was he doing in French clothes, and why had he come back to Beaucourt? She chose the direct method, and asked him the reason.
Brent was knotting the lace of his left boot. He looked up over his shoulder and smiled.
“I had a dream——”
He saw that she was quite unconvinced.
“Why does one do certain things? Have you a reason for everything? My friend was buried here, that’s all.”
He got up and went out into the yard, and Manon followed him. Brent turned into the garden through the gate in the stone wall, and walked along the weedy path between the currant bushes and the dead stalks of last year’s cabbages. He stopped at the place where the shell had punched a hole through the wall, and where the stones lay scattered.
“Is the place as you remember it?”