“Nicky, I’m so unhappy.  I didn’t know it was possible for anybody to be so unhappy in this world.”

She began to cry quietly.

“Desmond—­what is it?  What is it?  Tell me.  Why can’t you tell me?”

* * * * *

She thought, “It will be all right if he kisses me once.  If he holds me in his arms once.  Then I can tell him.”

For then he would know that he loved her.  He was not quite sure now.  She knew that he was not quite sure.  She trusted to the power of her body to make him sure.

Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor pitied it.

He had kissed her.  He had held her in his arms and kissed her more than once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow of his arm.  She was weak and small.  She was like some small, soft, helpless animal and she was hurt.  Her sobbing and panting made her ribs feel fragile like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless animal under the pressure of his arms.  And she was frightened.

He couldn’t stand the sight of suffering.  He had never yet resisted the appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and pain.  He could feel Desmond’s heart going thump, thump, under the blue thing he called her pinafore.  Her heart hurt him with its thumping.

And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was smooth and sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf.  And Desmond knew that he knew it.  His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over the long, polished bands of her black hair; and he thought that he loved her.  Desmond knew that he thought it.

And still she waited.  She said to herself, “It’s no good his thinking it.  I daren’t tell him till he says it.  Till he asks me to marry him.”

* * * * *

He had said it at last.  And he had asked her to marry him.  And then she had told him.

And all that he said was, “I don’t care.”  He said it to Desmond, and he said it to himself.

The funny thing was that he did not care.  He was as miserable as it was well possible to be, but he didn’t really care.  He was not even surprised.  It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in the back of his head behind all the ideas.

And yet he couldn’t have known it all the time.  Either it must have gone away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not to see it.

She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her mouth and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief, controlling herself, crying quietly.

She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn’t love her.  If he had loved her he would have cared intolerably.  He didn’t care about Headley Richards because he didn’t care about Desmond any more.  He was only puzzled.

“Why did you do it?”

“I can’t think why.  I must have been off my head.  I didn’t know what it was like.  I didn’t know.  I thought it would be wonderful and beautiful.  I thought he was wonderful and beautiful.”