“Of course I wouldn’t.  It wouldn’t be playing the game.  To begin with, I won’t believe that you’re not going to get through.

“But if you didn’t—­if you didn’t come back—­I still wouldn’t believe you’d gone.  I should say, ’He hasn’t cared.  He’s gone on to something else.  It doesn’t end him.’”

He was silent.  The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to.

Veronica followed the direction of his eyes.  “Do you mind talking about it?” she said.

“Me?  Rather not.  It sort of interests me.  I don’t know whether I believe in your thing or not; but I’ve always had that feeling, that you go on.  You don’t stop; you can’t stop.  That’s why I don’t care.  They used to think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn’t care.  But I really didn’t.  Things, most things, don’t much matter, because there’s always something else.  You go on to it.

“I care for you. You matter most awfully; and my people; but most of all you.  You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the first time I heard you calling out to me to come and sit on your bed because you were frightened.  You always will matter.

“But Desmond didn’t a little bit.  You need’nt have tried to make me think she didn’t.  She really didn’t.  I only married her because she was going to have a baby.  And that was because I remembered you and the rotten time you’d had.  I believe that would have kept me straight with women if nothing else did.

“Of course I was an idiot about it.  I didn’t think of marrying you till Vera told me I ought to have waited.  Then it was too late.

“That’s why I want you most awfully to have a baby.”

“Yes, Nicky.

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do when I know it’s coming.  The cottage belongs to Uncle Anthony, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I love it.  Do you think he’d let me live in it?”

“I think he’d give it to you if you asked him.”

“For my very own.  Like the apple-tree house.  Very well, he’ll give it to me—­I mean to both of us—­and I shall come up here where it’s all quiet and you’d never know there was a war at all—­even the Belgians have forgotten it.  And I shall sit out here and look at that hill, because it’s straight and beautiful.  I won’t—­I simply won’t think of anything that isn’t straight and beautiful.  And I shall get strong.  Then the baby will be straight and beautiful and strong, too.

“I shall try—­I shall try hard, Nicky—­to make him like you.”

* * * * *

Frances’s one Day was not a success.  It was taken up with little things that had to be done for Nicky.  Always they seemed, he and she, to be on the edge of something great, something satisfying and revealing.  It was to come in a look or a word; and both would remember it afterwards for ever.