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all—all—on the cross, and that all we need in life or death is to be sure of this.”
    Mama threw her arms around her and they clung together. But I stood rooted to the spot, knowing that I had seen a mystery.
    It was Father’s train ticket, given at the moment itself.
    With a flourish of her handkerchief and a forceful clearing of her nose, Tante Jans let us know that the moment for sentiment had passed.
    â€œIf I had a moment’s privacy,” she said, “I might get some work accomplished.”
    She glanced at Father, and into those stern eyes crept the nearest thing to a twinkle I had ever seen. “Not that the work matters, Casper. Not that it matters at all. But,” she dismissed us crisply, “I’m not going to leave an untidy desk behind for someone else to clean up.”
    I T WAS FOUR months after Tante Jans’s funeral that the long-awaited invitation came to Willem’s first sermon. After less than a year as assistant to a minister in Uithuizen, he had been given a church of his own in Brabant, the beautiful rural southern part of Holland. And in the Dutch Reformed Church, a minister’s first sermon in his first church was the most solemn, joyous, emotional occasion that an unemotional people could conceive. Family and friends would come from great distances and stay for days.
    From his own assistant pastorate, Karel wrote that he would be there and looked forward to seeing us all again. I endowed that word “all” with special meaning, and pressed dresses and packed trunks in a delirium of anticipation.
    It was one of Mama’s bad times. She huddled in the corner of our train compartment, the hand that gripped Father’s whitening at the knuckles each time the train lurched or swayed. But while the rest of us gazed out at long rows of poplars in their bright June green, Mama’s eyes never left the sky. What to us was a trip through the country, to her was a feast of clouds and light and infinite blue distances.
    Both the village of Made and the congregation of Willem’s church had declined in recent years. But the church building itself, dating back to better days, was large, and so was Willem and Tine’s house across the street. Indeed by Beje standards it was enormous; for the first few nights the ceiling seemed so far overhead that I could not sleep. Uncles and cousins and friends arrived each day, but no matter how many people moved in, the rooms always looked to me half empty.
    Three days after we got there I answered the front door knocker and there stood Karel, coal dust from the train trip still speckling his shoulders. He tossed his brown carpetbag past me into the hall, seized my hand, and drew me out into the June sunshine. “It’s a lovely day in the country, Corrie!” he cried. “Come walking!”
    From then on it seemed taken for granted that Karel and I would go walking each day. Each time we wandered a little farther down the country lanes that wound in every direction away from the village, the dirt beneath our feet so different from the brick streets of Haarlem. It was hard to believe, at such moments, that the rest of Europe was locked in the bloodiest war in history. Even across the ocean, the madness seemed to be spreading: the papers said America would enter.
    Here in neutral Holland one sunlit June day followed another. Only a few people—like Willem—insisted that the war was Holland’s tragedy too. His first sermon was on this theme. Europe and the world were changing, he said: no matter which side won, a way of life was gone forever. I looked around at his congregation of sturdy villagers and farmers and saw that they did not care for such ideas.
    After the sermon, friends and more distant family started home. But Karel lingered on. Our walks lasted longer. Often we talked about Karel’s future, and suddenly we were speaking not about what Karel was going to do, but about what we