Brent straightened with uneasy self-consciousness; he felt that he ought to be on the road. Manon had put her watch back, and she appeared to have forgotten Brent—though she was thinking of him all the while with a shrewdness that considered everything. If Manon had a heart, she also had a head.
“Mon ami,” she said suddenly, “I shall stay here to-night.”
“The cellar is quite dry.”
“That long walk frightens me. It is seventeen kilomètres to Ste. Claire.”
“Too far,” said Brent with grim cheerfulness; “you will be quite comfortable here. Those blankets should be dry—and I’ll cut you some more wood before I go.”
She ignored those last words of his, and stood up, pushing back the box on which she had been sitting.
“I want to look again at all my little property. Will you come with me?”
Brent glanced at her in surprise.
“Of course.”
He rose and stood waiting while she took her cloak from the nail and flung it over her shoulders. And suddenly he saw her as a lonely little figure, a woman left sitting alone in this ruined house, and the man in him rebelled. He pictured her helplessness, the impossible struggle she would be carrying on against Nature, and perhaps against men. He understood that life in Beaucourt would be very primitive, and it was possible that it might be cruel. There were all the elements of a savage struggle for existence among these rubbish heaps that had been houses.