“By the way, she says there’s a model.  I want to see that model.  Have you got it here?”

Nicky went up into the studio to look for it.  He couldn’t find it in the locker where he’d left it.  “Wherever is the damned thing?” he said.

“The damned thing,” said Desmond, “is where you should have sent it first of all—­at the War Office.  You’re clever, Nicky, but you aren’t quite clever enough.”

“I’m afraid,” he said, “you’ve been a bit too clever, this time.”

Drayton agreed with him.  It was, he said, about the worst thing that could possibly have happened.

“She shouldn’t have done that, Nicky.  What on earth could have made her do it?”

“Don’t ask me,” said Nicky, “what makes her do things.”

“It looks,” Drayton meditated, “as if she didn’t trust me.  I’m afraid she’s dished us.  God knows whether we can ever get it back!”

Desmond had a fit of hysterics when she realized how clever she had been.

* * * * *

Desmond’s baby was born late in November of that year, and it died when it was two weeks old.  It was as if she had not wanted it enough to give it life for long outside her body.

For though Desmond had been determined to have a child, and had declared that she had a perfect right to have one if she chose, she did not care for it when it came.  And when it died Nicky was sorrier than Desmond.

He had not wanted to be a father to Headley Richards’ child.  And yet it was the baby and nothing but the baby that had let him in for marrying Desmond.  So that, when it died, he felt that somehow things had tricked and sold him.  As they had turned out he need not have married Desmond after all.

She herself had pointed out the extreme futility of his behaviour, lest he should miss the peculiar irony of it.  For when her fright and the cause of her fright were gone Desmond resented Nicky’s having married her.  She didn’t really want anybody to marry her, and nobody but Nicky would have dreamed of doing it.

She lay weak and pathetic in her bed for about a fortnight; and for a little while after she was content to lie stretched out among her cushions on the studio floor, while Nicky waited on her.  But, when she got well and came downstairs for good, Nicky saw that Desmond’s weakness and pathos had come with the baby and had gone with it.  The real Desmond was not weak, she was not pathetic.  She was strong and hard and clever with a brutal cleverness.  She didn’t care how much he saw.  He could see to the bottom of her nature, if he liked, and feel how hard it was.  She had no more interest in deceiving him.

She had no more interest in him at all.