Drayton’s forecast was correct; Nicky’s brother Michael had not been removed from Nicky’s College eight months before letters of apology and restitution came.  But both apology and restitution came too late.

For by that time Nicky had married Desmond.

XIV

After Nicholas, Veronica; and after Veronica, Michael.

Anthony and Frances sat in the beautiful drawing-room of their house, one on each side of the fireplace.  They had it all to themselves, except for the cats, Tito and Timmy, who crouched on the hearthrug at their feet.  Frances’s forehead and her upper lip were marked delicately with shallow, tender lines; Anthony’s eyes had crow’s-feet at their corners, pointing to grey hairs at his temples.  To each other their faces were as they had been fifteen years ago.  The flight of time was measured for them by the generations of the cats that had succeeded Jane and Jerry.  For still in secret they refused to think of their children as grown-up.

Dorothy was upstairs in her study writing articles for the Women’s Franchise Union.  They owed it to her magnanimity that they had one child remaining with them in the house.  John was at Cheltenham; Veronica was in Dresden.  Michael was in Germany, too, at that School of Forestry at Aschaffenburg which Anthony had meant for Nicky.  They couldn’t bear to think where Nicky was.

When Frances thought about her children now her mind went backwards.  If only they hadn’t grown-up; if only they could have stayed little for ever!  In another four years even Don-Don would be grown-up—­Don-Don who was such a long time getting older that at fourteen, only two years ago, he had been capable of sitting in her lap, a great long-legged, flumbering puppy, while mother and son rocked dangerously together in each other’s arms, like two children, laughing together, mocking each other.

She was going to be wiser with Don-Don than she had been with Nicky.  She would be wiser with Michael when he came back from Germany.  She would keep them both out of the Vortex, the horrible Vortex that Lawrence Stephen and Vera had let Nicky in for, the Vortex that seized on youth and forced it into a corrupt maturity.  After Desmond’s affair Anthony and Frances felt that to them the social circle inhabited by Vera and Lawrence Stephen would never be anything but a dirty hell.

As for Veronica, the longer she stayed in Germany the better.

Yet Frances knew that they had not sent Veronica to Dresden to prevent her mother from getting hold of her.  When she remembered the fear she had had of the apple-tree house, she said to herself that Desmond was a judgment on her for sending little Veronica away.

And yet it was the kindest thing they could have done for her.  Veronica was happy in Dresden, living with a German family and studying music and the language.  She had no idea that music and the language were mere blinds, and that she had been sent to the German family to keep her out of Nicky’s way.