Both were very dirty, and the girl had a deep cut on the palm of one hand, roughly bandaged.
Howard was shocked at her appearance.
'My dear,' he said, 'whatever happened?
Has there been an accident?'
She laughed a little shrilly.
'It was the British,' she said.
'It was an air raid.
We were caught in Brest - this afternoon.
But it was the British, monsieur, that did this to me.'
Madame Arvers came bustling up with a glass of brandy.
Then she hustled the girl off into the kitchen.
Howard was left in the paddock, staring out towards the west.
The children had only understood half of what had happened.
Sheila said: 'It was the bad aeroplanes that did that to Nicole, monsieur, wasn't it?'
'That's right,' he said.
'Good aeroplanes don't do that sort of thing.'
The child was satisfied with that.
'It must have been a very, very bad aeroplane to do that to Nicole.'
There was general agreement on that point.
Ronnie said: 'Bad aeroplanes are German aeroplanes. Good aeroplanes are English ones.'
He made no attempt to unravel that one for them.
Presently Nicole came out into the garden, white-faced and with her hand neatly bandaged.
Madame hustled the children into the kitchen for their supper.
Howard asked after her hand.
'It is nothing,' she said.
'When a bomb falls, the glass in all the windows flies about.
That is what did it.'
'I am so sorry.'
She turned to him.
'I would not have believed that there would be so much glass in the streets,' she said.
'In heaps it was piled.
And the fires - houses on fire everywhere.
And dust, thick dust that smothered everything.'
'But how did you come to be mixed up in it?'
She said: 'It just happened.
We had been to Le Conquet, and after dejeuner we set out in the motor-car to return here.
And passing through Brest, Aristide wanted to go to the Bank, and I wanted tooth-powder and some other things - little things, you understand.
And it was while Aristide was in the Bank and I was in the shops in the Rue de Siam that it happened.'
'What did happen?' he asked.
She shrugged her shoulders.
'It was an aeroplane that came racing low over the roofs - so low that one could see the number painted on the body; the targets on the wings showed us that it was. English.
It swung round the Harbour and dropped its bombs near the Port Militaire, and then another of them came, and another - many of them.
It was the German ships in the harbour, I think, that they were bombing.
But several of them dropped their bombs in a long line, and these lines spread right into the town.
There were two bombs that hit houses in the Rue de Siam, and three or more in the Rue Louis Pasteur.
And where a bomb fell, the house fell right down, not five feet high, Monsieur - truly, that was all that\could be seen.
And there were fires, and clouds of smoke\nd dust, and glass - glass everywhere...'
There was a little silence.
'Were many people hurt?' he asked at last. -She said:
'I think very many.'