Still, there was a certain dreadful truth in their reproaches; and it stung.  Frances said to herselv that she had not been wise.  She had done a risky thing in taking Ronny.  It was not fair to her children, to Michael and Nicholas and John.  She was afraid.  She had been afraid when Vera had talked to her about Nicky and Veronica; and when she had seen Veronica and Nicky playing together in the apple-tree house; and when she had heard Ronny’s voice outside the schoolroom door crying, “Where’s Nicky?  I want him.  Will he be very long?”

Supposing Veronica should go on wanting Nicky, and supposing Nicky—­

Frances was so worried that, when Dorothy came striding across the lawn to ask her what the matter was, and what on earth Grannie and the Aunties had been gassing about all that time, she told her.

Dorothy was nineteen.  And Dorothy at nineteen, tall and upright, was Anthony’s daughter.  Her face and her whole body had changed; they were Anthony’s face and body made feminine.  Her little straight nose had now a short high bridge; her brown eyes were keen and alert; she had his hawk’s look.  She put her arm in Frances’s, protecting her, and they walked up and down the terrace path, discussing it.  In the distance Grannie and the Aunties could be seen climbing the slope of the Heath to Judges’ Walk.  They were not, Dorothy protested, pathetic; they were simply beastly.  She hated them for worrying her mother.

“They think I oughtn’t to have taken Ronny.  They think Nicky’ll want to marry her.”

“But Ronny’s a kid—­”

“When she’s not a kid.”

“He won’t, Mummy ducky, he won’t.  She’ll be a kid for ages.  Nicky’ll have married somebody else before she’s got her hair up.”

“Then Ronny’ll fall in love with him, and get her little heart broken.”

“She won’t, Mummy, she won’t.  They only talk like that because they think Ferdie’s Ronny’s father.”

“Dorothy!”

Frances, in horror, released herself from that protecting arm.  The horror came, not from the fact, but from her daughter’s knowledge of it.

“Poor Mummy, didn’t you know?  That’s why Bartie hates her.”

“It isn’t true.”

“What’s the good of that as long as Bartie thinks it is?” said Dorothy.

     “London Bridge is broken down
     (Ride over my Lady Leigh!)”

Veronica was in the drawing-room, singing “London Bridge.”

Michael, in all the beauty of his adolescence, lay stretched out on the sofa, watching her.  Her small, exquisite, childish face between the plaits of honey-coloured hair, her small, childish face thrilled him with a singular delight and sadness.  She was so young and so small, and at the same time so perfect that Michael could think of her as looking like that for ever, not growing up into a tiresome, bouncing, fluffy flapper like Rosalind Jervis.

Aunt Louie and Aunt Emmeline said that Rosalind was in love with him.  Michael thought that was beastly of them and he hoped it wasn’t true.