He thanked her, and busied himself making a bed for the children.
She stood there watching him, silent and bovine.
Presently the children were comfortable and settled for the night.
He left them and walked to the door of the barn and stood looking out.
The woman by him said:
'You are tired yourself, monsieur.'
He was deadly tired.
Now that his responsibilities were over for a while, he had suddenly become slack and faint.
'A little tired,' he said.
'I shall have supper and then I shall sleep with the children.
Bonne nuit, madame.'
She went back to the farmhouse, and he turned to the pram, to find the other portion of the loaf of bread.
Behind him the old woman called sharply from the door across the yard.
'You can come and have a bowl of soup with us, if you like.'
He went into the kitchen gratefully.
They had a stock-pot simmering on a charcoal stove; the old woman helped him to a large bowl of steaming broth and gave him a spoon.
He sat down gratefully at the bare, scrubbed table to consume it with his bread.
The woman said suddenly: 'Are you from Alsace?
You speak like a German.'
He shook his head.
'I'm an Englishman.'
'Ah - an Englishman!'
They looked at him with renewed interest.
'But the children, they are not English.'
The younger woman said: 'The bigger boy and the smaller girl are English.
They were not talking French.'
With some difficulty he explained the position to them.
They listened to him in silence, only half believing what he said.
In all her life the old woman had never had a holiday; only very occasionally had she been beyond the market town.
It was difficult for them to comprehend a world where people travelled to another country, far away from home, merely to catch fish.
And as for an old man who took care of other people's children for them, it simply did not make sense at all.
Presently they stopped bothering him with their questions, and he finished the soup in silence.
He felt better after that, much better.
He thanked them with grave courtesy and went out into the yard.
Already it was dusk.
On the road the lorries still rumbled past at intervals, but firing seemed to have ceased altogether.
The old woman followed him to the door.
'They do not stop tonight,' she said, indicating the road.
'The night before last the barn was full.
Twenty-two francs for sleeping soldiers - all in one night.'
She turned and went indoors again.
He went up to the loft.
The children were all asleep, curled up together in odd attitudes; the little boy Pierre twitched and whimpered in his sleep..
He still had the whistle clutched in one hand.
Howard withdrew it gently and put it on the chopping machine, then spread the blanket more evenly over the sleeping forms.
Finally he trod down a little of the hay into a bed and lay down himself, pulling his jacket round him.
Before sleep came to him he suffered a bad quarter of an hour.
Here was a pretty kettle offish, indeed.
It had been a mistake ever to have left Joigny, but it had not seemed so at the time.
He should have gone straight back to Dijon when he found he could not get to Paris, back to Switzerland, even.