drawings in grey wash, and the coloured drawings were perfect.  Nicky, unskilled in everything but the inventing and building up of engines, did not know how perfect the drawings were, any more than he knew the value of the extraordinary pictures that hung on the walls and stood on the easels in her studio; but he did know that, from the moment when he took Desmond into his adventure, he and his Idea were dependent on her.

He didn’t care.  He liked Desmond.  He couldn’t help it if Drayton disapproved of her and if Dorothy didn’t like her.  She was, he said to himself, a ripping good sort.  She might be frightfully clever; Nicky rather thought she was; but she never let you feel it; she never talked that revolting rot that Rosalind and Dorothy’s other friends talked.  She let you think.

It was Desmond who told him that his sister didn’t like her and that Frank Drayton disapproved of her.

“They wouldn’t,” said Nicky, “if they knew you.”  And he turned again to the subject of his Moving Fortress.

For Desmond’s intelligence was perfect, and her sympathy was perfect, and her way of listening was perfect.  She sat on the floor, on the orange and blue cushions, in silence and in patience, embracing her knees with her long, slender, sallow-white arms, while Nicky stamped up and down her studio and talked to her, like a monomaniac, about his Moving Fortress.  It didn’t bore her to listen, because she didn’t have to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm.  She liked looking at him; she liked his young naivete and monomania; she liked his face and all his gestures, and the poise and movement of his young body.

And as she looked at him the beauty that slept in her dulled eyes and in her sallow-white face and in her thin body awoke and became alive.  It was not dangerous yet; not ready yet to tell the secret held back in its long, subtle, serious, and slender lines.  Desmond’s sensuality was woven with so fine a web that you would have said it belonged less to her body than to her spirit and her mind.

* * * * *

In nineteen-eleven, on fine days in the late spring and early summer, when the Morss Company lent him a car, or when they sent him motoring about the country on their business, he took Desmond with him and Desmond’s painting box and easel.  And they rested on the grass borders of the high roads and on the edges of the woods and moors, and Desmond painted her extraordinary pictures while Nicky lay on his back beside her with his face turned up to the sky and dreamed of flying machines.

For he had done with his Moving Fortress.  It only waited for Desmond to finish the last drawing.

When he had that he would show the plans and the model to Frank Drayton before he sent them to the War Office.

He lived for that moment of completion.

* * * * *