Brent petted the beast.
“You poor old devil.”
He paused outside the Café de la Victoire—ironical yet prophetic name! It was a long, two-storied, lovable old house in red brick, set back beyond a raised path of grey, squared stones, and looking with its dormer windows into the orchard and garden of the big stone house across the way. The green shutters hung open. A lace curtain fluttered from one of the windows. Brent knew the Café de la Victoire; for he and Tom Beckett had drunk red wine there.
Paul did not enter the house, but scrambled up on to the raised path and pushed through a blue door in the stone wall surrounding the garden. There were pollarded lines beyond the wall, and a quaint bosky path ran between the rows of trees. Brent followed the path, knowing that it would bring him to the yard at the back of the house, and that he might find what he needed in one of the sheds. He had turned the corner where a clump of old Picardie roses showed a shimmer of green shoots, when he became aware of the most unexpected of all things—a woman.
The woman was on the other side of the garden, and close to a gap in the stone wall where a casual shell had knocked a little avalanche of grey stones into the garden. She had a spade in her hand and she had just finished pushing back the earth into a hole, and she was treading a few green weeds into the raw surface when she turned her head and saw Brent.
Brent knew her. It was Manon Latour, who owned the café, and he guessed that she had been burying her little treasures there. She stood motionless, rigid, staring at him with eyes that looked big and black in her white face, the eyes of a woman who was afraid.
II
Brent felt challenged.
He crossed the garden towards her, knocking the moisture from the leaves of a bed of winter-greens, and still followed by the brown dog. Brent’s French was very British, the Army French of estaminets and billets, but his heart was concerned in the convincing of Manon.
“Madame, allez vous! Le Boche—il arrive toute suite!”