“Magnificent,” said Brent.
“Borrowed—like your gig,” she added, with a look of mischief.
“There are times, madame, when it does not do to be too particular.”
“Ah, I have a piece of work for you—to-morrow. I have found my own kitchen stove. It is in the école.”
“No time like the present. I’ll collect it with the barrow.”
“It takes to bits, mon ami. You will find it in the ground-floor room on the left.”
“Map reference not required. I go—toute de suite.”
So Brent went out again into the ruins of Beaucourt and worked till the red sun set alight the beeches of the Bois du Renard and the sky was a steely blue above his head. Brent had been exploring the château on the hill, and he stood on the grass-grown drive, with the grass crisping with frost under his feet. He heard a partridge calling to its mate, a harsh but plaintive sound in the great silence.
A sudden solemnity fell upon Brent. He looked out over the wooded country purpling in the hollow of the up-rolling night. The redness began to die down beyond the Bois du Renard. Presently a star flickered out. The air was very cold, and Brent’s breath a patch of silver vapour.
The beauty and strangeness of it all seemed like the fall of a curtain at the end of that most wonderful day. Brent could hardly believe that so much had happened in ten short hours, those extraordinary hours full to the brim with inevitable adventure. He turned his head to look down at Beaucourt, a ghost village melting slowly into the dusk, a pattern of broken walls and gables, patches of whiteness, shadowy hollows like the eye-sockets of a skull. Brent saw a light shine out, a little yellow square in the darkness, solitary and strange. It was the light in the Café de la Victoire—Manon’s light.