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sooner had Sister Marguerite returned to her place than the lights went on again. A whisper of mirth escaped the novices. Reverend Mother did not look up.
    After the thanksgiving Sisters Gabrielle and Ursula stood up at their places along with Sister Marguerite until the other nuns had filed out. Gabrielle asked the refectorian if she might extinguish the candles. The older nun, rheumatic in her arms, gave permission but in a way that made Gabrielle think she was deliberately giving up an opportunity for greater sanctity. Gabrielle’s motive was sensitive if not holy: Sister Ursula was a robust girl from the Dordogne whose perpetual distraction—and the distraction of all those around her, for her stomach complained loudest at the most solemn moments—was hunger. That she fought her appetite for food, Gabrielle knew. She also knew, although she pretended not to be aware of it, that Sister Ursula often lost the struggle. If there was a scrap of food left on the plates they cleared, Ursula would slip it into her mouth. Gabrielle, putting out the candles, rightly supposed that the other novice would first remove to the scullery such plates as contained so much as the husk of a bean.
    Again Gabrielle thought of the Jewish couple. If they were hiding, how would they get food? And more important, if the woman was seriously ill, and Gabrielle felt that she was, how could they hide and find a doctor for her at the same time?
    Sister Ursula turned off the tap and tested the water in the tub. “Why did Reverend Mother take you with her today?”
    They whispered. Sister Marguerite was mending linens while she supervised them.
    “Because I am strong and I can drive a horse.”
    “Anybody could drive Poirot. You are Reverend Mother’s favorite.”
    “That’s not so. It would be a sin.”
    Sister Marguerite looked at them over the top of rimless glasses. She spoke with resounding clarity: “Sisters, do you think we are deaf?”
    “ Mea culpa ,” the novices murmured, glancing over their shoulders toward her.
    A few minutes later Ursula whispered again, “Then why did she take you?”
    It no longer seemed important to Gabrielle, so much had happened. “I don’t know.”
    “Maybe it was because of the children.”
    Gabrielle did not say anything.
    “Will they stay here?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “You do know, but you aren’t telling.”
    “Truly I don’t,” Gabrielle said. “The Germans may come and take them.”
    “Reverend Mother would not permit it.”
    Gabrielle thought of the little boy and the words she had heard at the station, and she thought of Reverend Mother in her stall in chapel that afternoon when the novices and lay nuns had filed out after vespers. She had never before seen her bowed down, her face concealed entirely from view. Gabrielle did not mention the boy to Sister Ursula.
    They did not speak again until the tub was drained and the places set for morning at the polished refectory tables. By then the nuns were passing from the chapel through the cloisters into the recreation room in the new building. The two novices hurried to be on time for recreation, but in the end they had to wait while Sister Marguerite put away her linens and inspected their work, almost dish by dish.
    “I wish it had been me who went,” Ursula said, and then added, “ Mea culpa .”
    At recreation Sister St. André did not mention the boy either. She described the bombings in the north and the flight of the refugees as the Germans pressed their security measures in the coastal cities. She told how her convent had hidden as many as twenty children at a time. “And when we had to leave, ourselves, we decided to take along as our wards the ones that were left. Our chaplain, God keep him safe, made out baptismal papers for them. ‘If Our Lord wishes them baptized,’ he said, ‘they are now baptized in His eyes.’ And so we brought them. We commend them as well as ourselves to your loving hospitality.”
    Gabrielle,