She thought:  “This is what he wants me to tell them about—­afterwards.”

“Yes, but—­I must have hurt them—­hurt them horribly—­lots of times.  I wish I hadn’t.

“But” he went on, “they’re funny, you know.  Dad actually thought it idiotic of us to do this.  He said it would only make it harder for us when I had to go.  They don’t see that it’s just piling it on—­going from one jolly adventure to another.

“I’m afraid, though, what he really meant was it was hard on you; because the rest of it’s all my show.”

“But it isn’t all your show, Nicky darling.  It’s mine, and it’s theirs—­because we haven’t grudged you your adventure.”

“That’s exactly how I want you to feel about it.”

“And they’re assuming that I shan’t come back.  Which, if you come to think of it, is pretty big cheek.  They talk, and they think, as though nobody ever got through.  Whereas I’ve every intention of getting through and of coming back.  I’m the sort of chap who does get through, who does come back.”

“And even if I wasn’t, if they studied statistics they’d see that it’s a thousand chances to one against the Boches getting me—­just me out of all the other chaps.  As if I was so jolly important.

“No; don’t interrupt.  Let’s get this thing straight while we can.  Supposing—­just supposing I didn’t get through—­didn’t come back—­supposing I was unlike myself and got killed, I want you to think of that, not as a clumsy accident, but just another awfully interesting thing I’d done.

“Because, you see, you might be going to have a baby; and if you took the thing as a shock instead of—­of what it probably really is, and went and got cut up about it, you might start the little beggar with a sort of fit, and shake its little nerves up, so that it would be jumpy all its life.

“It ought,” said Nicky, “to sit in its little house all quiet and comfy till it’s time for it to come out.”

He was struck with a sudden, poignant realization of what might be, what probably would be, what ought to be, what he had wanted more than anything, next to Veronica.

“It shall, Nicky, it shall be quiet and comfy.”

“If that came off all right,” he said, “it would make it up to Mother no end.”

“It wouldn’t make it up to me.”

“You don’t know what it would do,” he said.

She thought:  “I don’t want it.  I don’t want anything but you.”

“That’s why,” he went on, “I’m giving Don as the next of kin—­the one they’ll wire to; because it won’t take him that way; it’ll only make him madder to get out and do for them.  I’m afraid of you or Mummy or Dad, or Michael being told first.”

“It doesn’t matter a bit who’s told first.  I shall know first,” she said.  “And you needn’t be afraid.  It won’t kill either me or the baby.  If a shock could kill me I should have died long ago.”