Meanwhile Nelly had discovered Cicely’s secret—­which indeed was not very secret.  Captain Marsworth had appeared in London for the purpose of attending his Medical Board, and called at the flat.  Nelly was by that time on the sofa, with Cicely keeping guard, and Nelly could sometimes deaden her own consciousness for a little in watching the two.  What were they after?  Marsworth’s ethical enthusiasms and resentments, the prophetic temper that was growing upon him in relation to the war, his impatience of idleness and frivolity and ‘slackness,’ of all modes of life that were not pitched in a key worthy of that continuous sacrifice of England’s youngest and noblest that was going on perpetually across the Channel:—­these traits in him made it very easy to understand why, after years of philandering with Cicely Farrell, he was now, apparently, alienated from her, and provoked by her.  But then, why did he still pursue her?—­why did he still lay claim to the privileges of their old intimacy, and why did Cicely allow him to do so?

At last one evening, after a visit from Marsworth which had been one jar from beginning to end, Cicely had suddenly dropped on a stool, beside Nelly on the sofa.

‘What an intolerable man!’ she said with crimson cheeks.  ’Shall I tell Simpson not to let him in again?’

Nelly looked her surprise, for as yet there had been no confidence on this subject between them.  And then had come a torrent—­Cicely walking stormily up and down the room, and pouring out her soul.

The result of which outpouring was that through all the anger and denunciation, Nelly very plainly perceived that Cicely was a captured creature, endeavouring to persuade herself that she was still free.  She loved Marsworth—­and hated him.  She could not make up her mind to give up for his sake the ‘lust of the eye and the pride of life,’ as he clearly would endeavour to make her give them up, the wild bursts of gaiety and flirting for which she periodically rushed up to town, the passion for dress, the reckless extravagance with which it pleased her to shock him whenever they met.  And he also—­so it seemed to Nelly—­was torn by contradictory feelings.  As soon as Cicely was within reach, he could not keep away from her; and yet when confronted with her, and some new vagary, invented probably to annoy him, though he might refrain ‘even from good words,’ his critical mouth and eye betrayed him, and set the offender in a fury.

However, it was the quarrels between these two strange lovers, if they were lovers, that had made a friendship, warm and real—­on Cicely’s side even impassioned—­between Nelly and Cicely.  For Cicely had at last found someone—­not of her own world—­to whom she could talk in safety.  Yet she had treated the Sarratts cavalierly to begin with, just because they were outsiders, and because ‘Willy’ was making such a fuss with them; for she was almost as easily jealous in her brother’s case as in Marsworth’s.  But now Nelly’s sad remoteness from ordinary life, her very social insignificance, and the lack of any links between her and the great Farrell kinship of relations and friends, made her company, and her soft, listening ways specially welcome and soothing to Cicely’s excited mood.