Howard could understand only a few words of German, the others nothing at all. They stared at him uncertainly. 'Cartes d'identite,' he said sharply.
Focquet and Nicole produced their French identity-cards; the man studied them in silence. Then he looked up. Howard put down his British passport on the bare table in the manner of a man who plays the last card of a losing hand.
The Feldwebel smiled faintly, took it up, and studied it with interest. 'So!' he said. 'Englander. Winston Churchill.'
He raised his eyes and studied the children. In difficult French he asked if they had any papers, and appeared satisfied when told that they had not.
Then he gave a few orders in German. The party were searched for weapons, and all they had was taken from them and placed on the table - papers, money, watches, and personal articles of every sort, even their handkerchiefs. Then they were taken to another room with a few palliasses laid out on the floor, given a blanket each, and left. The window was barred over roughly with wooden beams; outside it in the road a sentry stood on guard.
Howard turned to Focquet. 'I am very sorry this has happened,' he said. He felt that the Frenchman had not even had a run for his money.
The young man shrugged his shoulders philosophically. 'It was a chance to travel and to see the world with de Gaulle,' he said. 'Another chance will come.' He threw himself down on one of the palliasses, pulled the blanket round him, and composed himself to sleep.
Howard and Nicole arranged the palliasses in two pairs to make beds for the little boys and the little girls, and got them settled down to sleep. There remained one mattress over.
'You take that,' he said. 'I shall not sleep tonight.'
She shook her head. 'Nor I either.'
Half an hour later they were sitting side by side leaning against the wall, staring out of the barred window ahead of them. It was practically dark within the room; outside the harbour showed faintly in the starlight and the last glow of evening. It was still quite warm.
She said: 'They will examine us in the morning. What shall we say?'
'There's only one thing we can say. Tell them the exact truth.'
She considered this for a moment. 'We must not bring in Arvers, nor Loudeac or Quintin if we can avoid it.'
He agreed. 'They will ask where I got these clothes. Can you say that you gave them to me?'
She nodded. 'That will do. Also, I will say that I knew Focquet and arranged with him myself.'
She crossed to the young man, now half asleep, and spoke earnestly to him for a few minutes. He grunted in agreement; the girl came back to Howard and sat down again.
'One more thing,' he said. There is Marjan. Shall I say that I picked him up on the road?'
She nodded. 'On the road before you came to Chartres. I will see that he understands that.'
He said doubtfully: 'That should be all right so long as they don't cross-examine the children.'
They sat in silence for a long time after that. Presently she stirred a little by him, shifting to a more comfortable position.
'Go and lie down, Nicole,' he said. 'You must get some sleep.'
'I do not want to sleep, monsieur,' she said. 'Truly I am better sitting here like this.'
'I've been thinking about things,' he said.
'I also have been thinking.'
He turned to her in the darkness. 'I am so very sorry to have brought you into all this trouble,' he said quietly. 'I did want to avoid that, and I thought that we were going to.'
She shrugged her shoulders. 'It does not matter.' She hesitated. 'I have been thinking about different things to that.'
'What things?' he asked.
'When you introduced Focquet - you said I was your daughter-in-law.'
'I had to say something,' he remarked. 'And that's very nearly true.'
In the dun light he looked into her eyes, smiling a little. 'Isn't it?'
'Is that how you think of me?'
'Yes,' he said simply.
There was a long silence in the prison. One of the children, probably Willem, stirred and whimpered uneasily in his sleep; outside the guard paced on the dusty road.
At last she said: 'What we did was wrong - very wrong.' She turned towards him. Truly, I did not mean to do wrong when I went to Paris, neither did John. We did not go with that in mind at all. I do not want that you should think it was his fault. It was nobody's fault, neither of us. Also, it did not seem wrong at the time.'
His mind drifted back fifty years. 'I know,' he said. 'That's how these things happen. But you aren't sorry, are you?'
She did not answer that, but she went on more easily. 'He was very, very naughty, monsieur. The understanding was that I was to show him Paris, and it was for that that I went to Paris to meet him. But when the time came, he was not interested in the churches or in the museums, or the picture-galleries at all.' There was a touch of laughter in her voice. 'He was only interested in me.'
'Very natural,' he said. It seemed the only thing to say.
'It was very embarrassing, I assure you, I did not know what I should do.'
He laughed. 'Well, you made your mind up in the end.'
She said reproachfully: 'Monsieur - it is not a matter to laugh over. You are just like John. He also used to laugh at things like that.'
He said: 'Tell me one thing, Nicole. Did he ask you if you would marry him?'
She said: 'He wanted that we should marry in Paris before he went back to England. He said that under English law that would be possible.'
'Why didn't you?' he asked curiously.
She was silent for a minute. Then she said: 'I was afraid of you, monsieur.'
'Of me?'
She nodded. 'I was terrified. It now sounds very silly, but - it was so.'
He struggled to understand. 'What were you frightened of?' he asked.
She said: 'Figure it to yourself. Your son would have brought home a foreign girl, that he had married very suddenly in Paris. You would have thought that he had been foolish in a foreign city, as young men sometimes are. That he had been trapped by a bad woman into an unhappy marriage. I do not see how you could have thought otherwise.'
'If I had thought that at first,' he said, 'I shouldn't have thought it for long.'
'I know that now. That is what John told me at the time. But I did not think that it was right to take the risk. I told John, it would be better for everybody that we should be a little more discreet, you understand.'
'I see. You wanted to wait a bit.'
She said: 'Not longer than could be helped. But I wanted very much that everything should be correct, that we should start off right. Because, to be married, it is for all one's hie, and one marries not only to the man but to the relations also. And in a mixed marriage things are certain to be difficult, in any case. And so, I said that I would come to England for his next leave, in September or October, and we would meet in London, and he could then take me to see you in your country home. And then you would write to my father, and everything would be quite in order and correct.'
'And then the war came,' he said quietly.
She repeated: 'Yes, monsieur, then the war came. It was not then possible for me to visit England. It would almost have been easier for John to visit Paris again, but he could get no leave. And so I went on struggling to get my permis and the visa month after month.
'And then,' she said, 'they wrote to tell me what had happened.'
They sat there for a long time, practically in silence. The air grew colder as the night went on. Presently the old man heard the girl's breathing grow more regular and knew she was asleep, still sitting up on the bare wooden floor.
