It seemed that she had told her mother little about John; she had nursed her grief in silence, dumb and inarticulate.
Then he had turned up, quite suddenly, at the door one day.
To her secret grief he added an acute embarrassment.
He turned over again.
He must let her alone, let her talk if she wanted to, be silent if she chose.
If he did that, perhaps she would open out as time went on.
It had been of her own volition she had told him about John.
He lay awake for several hours, turning these matters over in his mind.
Presently, after a long time, he slept.
He woke in the middle of the night, to the sound of wailing.
He opened his eyes; the wailing came from one of the children.
He sat up, but Nicole was before him; by the time he was fully awake she was out of her bed, crouching down by a red-faced, mournful little boy sitting up and crying bitterly.
It was Willem, crying as if his heart was going to break.
The girl put her arm round him and spoke to him in soft, baby French.
The old man rolled out of his blanket, got up stiffly and moved over to them.
'What is it?' he enquired.
'What is the matter?'
The girl said: 'I think he has had a nightmare - that is all.
Presently he will sleep again.'
She turned again to comfort him.
Howard felt singularly helpless.
His way with the children had been to talk to them, to treat them as equals.
That simply did not work at all, unless you knew the language, and he knew no word of any language that this little Dutch boy spoke.
Left to himself he might have taken him on his knee and talked to him as man to man; he could never have soothed him as this girl was soothing him.
He knelt down clumsily beside them.
'Do you think he is unwell?' he asked.
'He has perhaps eaten something that upset him?'
She shook her head; already the sobs were dying down.
'I do not think so,' she said softly.
'Last night he did this, twice.
It is bad dreams, I think.
Only bad dreams.'
The old man's mind drifted back to the unpleasant town of Pithiviers; it would be natural, he thought, for bad dreams to haunt the child.
He wrinkled his forehead.
'You say that he did this twice last night, mademoiselle?' he said.
'I did not know.'
She said: 'You were tired and sleeping very well.
Besides your door was shut.
I went to him, but each time he very soon went to sleep again.'
She bent over him.
'He is almost asleep again now,' she said softly.
There was a long, long silence.
The old man stared around; the long, sloping floor was lit by one dim blue light over the door.
Dark forms lay huddled on palliasses here and there; two or three snorers disturbed the room; the air was thick and hot.
From sleeping in his clothes he felt sticky and dirty.
The pleasant, easy life that he had known in England seemed infinitely far away.
This was his real life.
He was a refugee, sleeping on straw in a disused cinema with a German sentry at the door, his companion a French girl, a pack of foreign children in his care.
And he was tired, tired, dead tired.
The girl raised her head.