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touching of her forehead with her fingertips.
    Marc said, “Amen.”
    She looked up in surprise, then her whole face broke into a smile.
    “Tradition,” he said.
    “It will do.”
    They washed in the water he had brought up in a borrowed bucket, sipped a little from the flask of cognac given them for their wedding, and ate the plums and cheese and black bread while he told of the gypsy-dark woman at the corner bistro with whom he had exchanged his ration coupons and a little money for all the food she could give him.
    “Did you tell her anything about us?”
    “I did not even tell her there was an us, but I asked her if she knew a Monsieur Lapin. ‘Monsieur,’ she said, ‘if I did, I would have him in the pot.’ She gave me the matches and the soap—which she makes herself, I must say the place has the smell of it—and the loan of the bucket.”
    “You have a very sensitive nose,” Rachel said.
    “Is that bad?”
    “You must tell me” she said and her own nose crinkled.
    He put his hand on hers where it lay on the table and pressed it just a little. They sat silently and looked into each other’s eyes. Very slowly her hand turned until the palm was upward beneath his.

6
    I N THE MIDST OF the evening meal that night at the convent of Ste. Geneviève, the electricity failed. The lecturer suspended her reading and there was a small clatter of knives and forks that would not have occurred had there been light by which to set them down more carefully.
    Sister St. André broke the community silence to declare: “In Normandy this happened every night. Then very soon we could hear the planes droning like bees in the distance.”
    Her words, together with the awareness of the children now having supper with Sister Agathe in the infirmary, gave the nuns of the house an eerie appreciation of the events which had brought their sisters from the north among them.
    Reverend Mother said gently, “There will be no planes, so we shall keep our discipline.”
    Outside, darkness had not completely fallen, but the walls of the refectory, which was in the oldest wing of the building, were over a meter thick, and the windows so small as to give no more than a necklace of light at the height of noon. Now they seemed but pale stones among those blackened with age. Sister Marguerite, the refectorian, arose from her place and glided toward the vestibule where the lighting staff was kept. She trod with a ghostly quiet, for the flagstones were as familiar as the shoes on her feet.
    A vigil lamp burned before the statue of Ste. Geneviève, and on this thirteenth-century sculpture of a seventh-century saint, its colors faintly luminous, Sister Gabrielle gazed in attempted meditation. Reverend Mother had suggested on their return from St. Hilaire that, in order to overcome the day’s distractions, she contemplate the life of the convent’s patroness; perhaps Reverend Mother forgot at the moment that Ste. Geneviève was also the patron saint of Paris where she had foretold the invasion of the city by the Huns and, her prophecy fulfilled, had led the people to safety on the Island.
    Gabrielle rarely found it difficult to think about Ste. Geneviève, but now she found herself thinking more about the Huns. Her father had always spoken of the Germans that way and that day she had learned herself how terrible they could be. She would not exalt herself to say that God had chosen her as His intermediary, yet she could not get over the fact that she had seen the mill of her childhood on the way to the station. Nor could she forget the Jewish woman’s face, her fear when her husband had to show his identification. All the way home, with the children sitting at her feet, their legs dangling at Poirot’s rump, she had wondered what their mothers looked like and if they had been as frightened as the woman she had helped.
    The refectorian returned and lighted the candles overhead. The lecturer resumed her reading, the other nuns their meal. No