“When?”

“When you went to Desmond.  Then, when I thought I couldn’t bear it any longer, something happened.”

“What?”

“I don’t know.  I don’t know what it is now; I only know what it does.  It always happens—­always—­when you want it awfully.  And when you’re quiet and give yourself up to it.”

“It’ll happen again.”

He listened, frowning a little, not quite at ease, not quite interested; puzzled, as if he had lost her trail; put off, as if something had come between him and her.

“You can make it happen to other people,” she was saying; “so that when things get too awful they can bear them.  I wanted it to happen to Dorothy when she was in prison, and it did.  She said she was absolutely happy there; and that all sorts of queer things came to her.  And, Nicky, they were the same queer things that came to me.  It was like something getting through to her.”

“I say—­did you ever do it to me?”

“Only once, when you wanted it awfully.”

“When?  When?”

Now he was interested; he was intrigued; he was on her trail.

“When Desmond did—­that awful thing.  I wanted you to see that it didn’t matter, it wasn’t the end.”

“But that’s just what I did see, what I kept on telling myself.  It looks as if it worked, then?”

“It doesn’t always.  It comes and goes.  But I think with you it would always come; because you’re more me than other people; I mean I care more for you.”

She closed and clinched it.  “That’s why you’re not to bother about me, Nicky.  If the most awful thing happened, and you didn’t come back, It would come.”

“I wish I knew what It was,” he said.

“I don’t know what it is.  But it’s so real that I think it’s God.”

“That’s why they’re so magnificently brave—­Dorothy and Aunt Frances and all of them.  They don’t believe in it; they don’t know it’s there; even Michael doesn’t know it’s there—­yet; and still they go on bearing and bearing; and they were glad to give you up.”

“I know,” he said; “lots of people say they’re glad, but they really are glad.”

He meditated.

“There’s one thing.  I can’t think what you do, unless it’s praying or something; and if you’re going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you’d be careful; because it seems to me that if there’s anything in it at all, there might be hitches.  I mean to say, you might work it just enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from being blown off.  Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic.

“That’s what I should funk.  I should funk it most damnably, if I thought about it.  Luckily one doesn’t think.”

“But, Nicky, I shouldn’t try to keep you back then any more than I tried before.”

“You wouldn’t?  Honour bright?”