Henri sat still and smoked. He thought of many things--of Sara Lee's
eyes when in the center of the London traffic she had held the dying
donkey; of her small and radiant figure at the Savoy; of the morning he
had found her at Calais, in the Gare Maritime, quietly unconscious that
she had done a courageous thing. And he thought, too, of the ring and
the photograph she carried. But mostly he remembered the things she had
said to him on their last meeting.
Perhaps there came to him his temptation too. It would be so easy that
night, if things went well, to make a brave showing before her, to let
her see that these odd jobs he did had their value and their risks. But
he put that from him. The little house of mercy must be empty that
night, for her sake. He shivered as he remembered the room where she
slept, the corner that was shot away and left open to the street.
So he sat and watched. And at one o'clock the mill wheel began turning.
It was easy to count the revolutions by the red wing. Nine times it
turned, and stopped. After five minutes or so it turned again, thirty
times. Henri smiled: an ugly smile.
"A good guess," he said to himself. "But it must be more than a guess."
His work for the afternoon was done. Still with the bent-kneed swing he
struck back to the road, and avoiding the crossroads, went across more
fields to a lane where Jean waited with the car. Henri took a plunge
into the canal when he had removed his French uniform, and producing a
towel from under a bush rubbed himself dry. His lean boyish body
gleamed, arms and legs brown from much swimming under peaceful summer
suns. On his chest he showed two scars, still pink. Shrapnel bites, he
called them. But he had, it is to be feared, a certain young
satisfaction in them.
He was in high good humor. The water was icy, and Jean had refused to
join him.
"My passion for cleanliness," Henri said blithely, "is the result of my
English school days. You would have been the better for an English
education, Jean."
"A canal in March!" Jean grunted. "You will end badly."
Henri looked longingly at the water.
"Had I a dry towel," he said, "I would go in again."
Jean looked at him with his one eye.
"You would be prettier without those scars," he observed. But in his
heart he prayed that there might be no others added to them, that
nothing might mar or destroy that bright and youthful body.