"So it is." McGregor smiled to hear that, but not too much: he'd passed his own stern Presbyterian ethic down to the new generation. "The Yanks have so many other sins on the book against them, though, that lying doesn't look like so much to them."

"Well, it should," Mary said. "It should all count against them, every bit of it. And it will. God counts everything" She spoke with great assurance.

McGregor wished he felt so sure himself. He believed, yes, but he'd lost that simple certainty. If he'd had any left, Alexander's death would have burned it out of him, leaving ashes behind. He said, "You will go to school, then, and be a good little parrot, so we can show the Americans we're obeying their law?"

His younger daughter sighed. "If I have to," she said again.

"Good," McGregor said. "The more we look like we're doing what they want us to, the more we can do what we want to when they aren't looking."

Julia said, "That's good, Pa. That's very good. That's just what we'll do."

"That's what we'll have to do," Maude said. "That's what everyone will have to do, for however long it takes till we're free again."

"Or till we turn into Americans," Arthur McGregor said bleakly. He held up a work-roughened hand. "No, I don't mean us. Some of our neighbors will turn into Americans, but not us."

"Some of our neighbors have already turned into Americans," Julia said. "They don't care about what they were, so they don't care what they are. We know better. We're Canadians. We'll always be Canadians. Always."

McGregor wondered if, with the strongest will in the world, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren would remember they were Canadians. And then, perhaps wondering the same thing, Maude spoke as if to reassure herself: "Germany took Alsace and Lorraine away from France almost fifty years ago, but the people there still remember they're Frenchmen."