“Manage what?”
“To be dead.”
He looked a little embarrassed, and then he told her.
“When my friend was killed down there in the orchard, I had an idea, an inspiration. He had no wife or children, no one who cared. So I buried myself in his grave, and took his name. It was so simple. I wanted to disappear, and to begin life over again.”
She was silent for a while, and her eyes seemed to be looking at a picture—a picture of this Englishman’s life. Her silence troubled Brent. He began to fidget.
“Perhaps it was a coward’s trick,” he suggested; “what do you think?”
“It is not easy to judge.”
Manon sat very still—realizing that he was in earnest.
“So you have turned Frenchman?”
He gave her a shy look.