Half-way home her mind began to ask questions of its own accord.

“Supposing you had to choose between the Suffrage and Frank Drayton?”

“But I haven’t got to.”

“You might have.  You know you might any minute.  You know he hates it.  And supposing—­”

But Dorothy refused to give any answer.

His wire came within the next half hour.

“Coming three sharp.  FRANK.”

Her sense of well-being increased almost to exaltation.

* * * * *

He arrived with punctuality at three o’clock. (He was in the gunners and had a job at Woolwich.) She found him standing on the hearth-rug in the drawing-room.  He had blown his nose when he heard her coming, and that meant that he was nervous.  She caught him stuffing his pocket-handkerchief (a piece of damning evidence) into his breast-pocket.

With her knowledge of his nervousness her exaltation ceased as if it had not been.  At the sight of him it was as if the sentence hidden somewhere in her mind—­“You’ll have to choose.  You know you’ll have to”—­escaping thought and language, had expressed itself in one suffocating pang.  Unless Nicky’s affair staved off the dreadful moment.

“Were you frightfully busy?”

“No, thank goodness.”

The luck she had had!  Of course, if he had been busy he couldn’t possibly have come.

She could look at him now without a tightening in her throat.  She liked to look at him.  He was made all of one piece.  She liked his square face and short fine hair, both the colour of light-brown earth; his eyes, the colour of light brown earth under clear water; eyes that looked small because they were set so deep.  She liked their sudden narrowing and their deep wrinkles when he smiled.  She liked his jutting chin, and the fine, rather small mouth that jerked his face slightly crooked when he laughed.  She liked that slender crookedness that made it a face remarkable and unique among faces.  She liked his brains.  She liked all that she had ever seen or heard of him.

Vera had told them that once, at an up-country station in India, he had stopped a mutiny in a native battery by laughing in the men’s faces.  Somebody that Ferdie knew had been with him and saw it happen.  The men broke into his office where he was sitting, vulnerably, in his shirt-sleeves.  They had brought knives with them, beastly native things, and they had their hands on the handles, ready.  They screamed and gesticulated with excitement.  And Frank Drayton leaned back in his office chair and looked at them, and burst out laughing, because, he said, they made such funny faces.  When they got to fingering their knives, he tilted back his chair and rocked with laughter.  His sudden, incredible mirth frightened them and stopped the mutiny.  She could see him, she could see his face jerked crooked with delight.

That was the sort of thing that Nicky would have done.  She loved him for that.  She loved him because he was like Nicky.