Her eyes seemed to question him. “Is it that you are wiser and a little more sensitive than other men? You can hold back.”
She went out into the passage, and Brent took her place at the window, lounging in the sunlight with his hands in his pockets, and recasting the metal of his vision. For a few short hours life had seemed solid and real, centred in that cellar in ruined Beaucourt, a life of quaint adventure, a boyish game played with the elements of existence as the counters. All this had changed with the return of Manon Latour. Brent felt himself adrift—on the edge again of a casual vagabondage. He was surrendering that cellar and all that it contained, food, shelter, even the vague inspiration that had been born in it. He saw himself packing his bag and marching.
“Monsieur.”
He had been so absorbed in these thoughts that he had not heard her re-enter the kitchen. He was struck by her seriousness. She, too, had been thinking.
“How long have you been in Beaucourt?”
“Since yesterday,” said Brent.
She sat down on the box.
“Since yesterday. And in my cellar I find food for many days, a bed, plates, blankets, all that a man would think of—if——”
She paused, looking up at him.
“What I did yesterday will be useful to you to-day.”