Bartie growled:  “Did you hear your mother telling you to say Good-night?”

“Yes.  But I must kiss Uncle Anthony first.  Properly.  Once on his mouth.  Once—­on his nose.  And once—­on—­his—­eyes.  And—­once—­on—­his dear little—­ears.”

After that, Veronica went slowly from chair to chair, lingering at each, sitting first on Frances’s lap, then on Vera’s, spinning out her caresses, that spun out the time and stretched it farther and farther between her and the unearthly hour ahead of her.

But at her father’s chair she did not linger for a single instant.  She slipped her hand into his hand that dropped it as if it had hurt him; she touched his forehead with her small mouth, pushed out, absurdly, to keep her face as far as possible from his.  For, though she was not afraid of Bartie, he was not nice either to sit on or to kiss.

Half-way across the room she lingered.

“I haven’t sung ‘London Bridge is broken down.’  Don’t you want me to sing it?”

“No, darling.  We want you to go to bed.”

“I’m going, Mummy.”

And at the door she turned and looked at them with her sorrowful, lucid, transparent eyes.

Then she went, leaving the door open behind her.  She left it open on purpose, so that she might hear their voices, and look down into the room on her way upstairs.  Besides, she always hoped that somebody would call her back again.

She lingered at the foot of the stairs till Bartie got up and shut the door on her.  She lingered at the turn of the stairs and on the landing.  But nobody ever called her back again.

And nobody but Nicky knew what she was afraid of.

Veronica was sitting up in the cot that used to be Nicky’s when he was little.  Nicky, rather cold in his pyjamas, sat on the edge of it beside her.  A big, yellow, tremendous moon hung in the sky outside the window, behind a branch of the tree of Heaven, and looked at them.

Veronica crouched sideways on her pillow in a corner of the cot, her legs doubled up tight under her tiny body, her shoulders hunched together, and her thin arms hanging before her straight to her lap.  Her honey coloured hair was parted and gathered into two funny plaits, that stuck out behind her ear.  Her head was tilted slightly backwards to rest against the rail of the cot.  She looked at Nicky and her look reminded him of something, he couldn’t remember what.

“Were you ever afraid, Nicky?” she said.

Nicky searched his memory for some image encircled by an atmosphere of terror, and found there a white hound with red smears on his breast and a muzzle like two saws.

“Yes,” he said, “I was once.”

A lamb—­a white lamb—­was what Veronica looked like.  And Jerry bad looked at him like that when he found him sitting on the mustard and cress the day Boris killed him.

“Afraid—­what of?”

“I don’t know that it was ‘of’ exactly.”