“I am ready.”
She gave him a flicker of her brown eyes, eyes that were on the verge of tears. He saw her bite her lower lip, and stiffen her shoulders as they went out into the street and stood there together looking up at the red shell of the house. A little furrow of pain, pain that was being fought and suppressed, showed on Manon’s forehead.
“Ma pauvre petite maison!”
Brent knew now that he wanted to stay in Beaucourt, that there was work here, work fit for a man’s hands.
“The walls are good,” he said; “they will stand.”
“But what can I do with bare walls, mon ami?”
She turned and walked into the yard, passing between the stone pillars that had lost their gates. The yard was full of the cosmopolitan rubbish that war creates, the elements of a civilized home reduced to one common scrap-heap. The stable had lost its roof. The little barn and the cow-house were mere timber frames from which the tiles and the plaster had fallen. Manon stood and looked at it all, and her mouth quivered.
“You see,” she said with a helpless gesture of the hands; “what is a woman to do?”
They passed on into the garden, and the garden did not despair. It had one great wound, a huge shell-hole in its centre, a pit into which the Germans had pitched their refuse, but an hour or two’s work with a spade would heal all that. The two holes in the stone wall needed stopping, and the espaliers cried out for the pruning knife, but as for the weeds, well they would make green manure. Manon and Paul wandered down into the orchard, climbing through the shell-hole in the wall, and here too Nature had a smile of promise, a promise of green growth that nothing could hinder or dismay.
Manon saw Beckett’s grave and glanced at Brent.