“I must tell you about Bibi.”
Then they looked at each other, for someone was trampling over the piles of broken brick inside the shell of the Hôtel de Paris. The sound came towards them. A tall man appeared in the doorway, a man wearing a soft black hat, a black coat, and the blue breeches and puttees of a French soldier. He stood and smiled and took off his hat.
“Good morning, Madame Latour.”
Manon’s face became a thing of stone.
“Good morning, Monsieur Blanc. A fine day for the ruins, is it not?”
Bibi was looking at Brent with a peculiar and cynical curiosity.
“I have muddled the name, have I? Madame is no longer a widow.”
Manon snubbed him.
“I will leave you to guess, monsieur.”
Bibi laughed. He was a sallow-faced man with a pair of insolent, light blue eyes, a nose that broadened out towards the nostrils in the shape of a green fig, and a mouth that looked as though it had been hacked out in the rough and never finished. He had a way of staring people in the face with a faintly ironical smile, a smile that put them down in the mud. He looked very strong with the strength of a great, raw-boned, nasty-tempered horse. The backs of his hands were covered with black hair.