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were reported to be having difficulty in starting a family. They would be happy to have Eve in their home, even after their own children came along, if they did. But Mother Francis had fought like a tiger for that small bundle that she had rescued from the cottage, on the day she was born. The child they had reared until some solution could be found. Nobody had seen that Jack Malone’s solution would involve throwing himself over the quarry one dark night. After that there had been no one with better claim to Eve than the nuns who had reared her.
    It was the first of many Sunday dinners in Lisbeg for Eve. She loved coming to the house. Every week she brought something which she arranged in a vase. Mother Francis had shown her how to go up the long windy path behind the convent and pick catkins and wild flowers. At the start she would rehearse arranging them with the nun so that she would do it well when she got to the Hogans, but as the weeks went by she grew in confidence. She could bring armfuls of autumn colors and make a beautiful display onthe hall table. It became a ritual. Patsy would have the vases ready to see what Eve would bring today.
    “Don’t you have a lovely house!” she would say wistfully and Annabel Hogan would smile, pleased, and congratulate herself on having brought these two together.
    “How did you meet Mrs. Hogan?” she would ask Benny’s father. And “Did you always want to run a business?” The kinds of questions Benny never thought to ask but was always interested in the answers.
    She had never known that her parents met at a tennis party in a county far away. She had never heard that Father had been apprenticed to another business in the town of Ballylee. Or that Mother had gone to Belgium for a year after she left school to teach English in a convent.
    “You make my parents say very interesting things,” she said to Eve one afternoon as they sat in Benny’s bedroom, and Eve marveled over being allowed to use an electric fire all for themselves.
    “Well, they’ve got great stories like olden times.”
    “Yes …” Benny was doubtful.
    “You see the nuns don’t have.”
    “They must have. Surely. They can’t have forgotten,” Benny said.
    “But they’re not meant to think about the past, you know, and life before Entering, they really start from when they became Brides of Christ. They don’t have stories of olden days like your mother and father do.”
    “Would they like you to be a nun too?” Benny asked.
    “No, Mother Francis said that they wouldn’t take me, even if I did want to be a nun, until I was over twenty-one.”
    “Why’s that?”
    “She says it’s the only life I know, and I might want to join just because of that. She says when I leave school I have to go out and get a job for at least three years before I even think of Entering.”
    “Wasn’t it lucky you met up with them,” Benny said.
    “Yes. Yes, it was.”
    “I don’t mean lucky that your mother and father died, but if they had to wasn’t it great you didn’t go somewhere awful.”
    “Like in stories with wicked stepmothers,” Eve agreed.
    “I wonder why they got you. Nuns usually don’t get children unless it’s an orphanage.”
    “My father worked for them. They sent him up to Westlands to earn some money because they couldn’t pay him much. That’s where he met my mother. They feel responsible I think.”
    Benny was dying to know more. But she remembered Patsy’s advice.
    “Well, it all turned out fine, they’re mad about you up there.”
    “Your parents are mad about you too.”
    “It’s a bit hard sometimes, like if you want to wander off.”
    “It is for me too,” Eve said. “Not much wandering off above in the convent.”
    “It’ll be different when we’re older.”
    “It mightn’t be,” Eve said sagely.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, we have to show them we’re terribly trustworthy or something, show them that if we
are
allowed to wander off, we’ll