All through the winter of nineteen-eleven and the spring of nineteen-twelve they worked at it together.  They owned that they were thus getting better results than either of them could have got alone.  There were impossibilities about Nicky’s model that a gunner would have seen at once, and there were faults in Drayton’s plans that an engineer would not have made.  Nicky couldn’t draw the plans and Drayton couldn’t build the models.  They said it was fifty times better fun to work at it together.

Nicky was happy.

* * * * *

Desmond watched them sombrely.  She and Alfred Orde-Jones, the painter, laughed at them behind their backs.  She said “How funny they are!  Frank wouldn’t hurt a fly and Nicky wouldn’t say ‘Bo!’ to a goose if he thought it would frighten the goose, and yet they’re only happy when they’re inventing some horrible machine that’ll kill thousands of people who never did them any harm.”  He said, “That’s because they haven’t any imagination.”

Nicky got up early and went to bed late to work at the Moving Fortress.  The time between had to be given to the Works.  The Company had paid him fairly well for all his patents in the hope of getting more of his ideas, and when they found that no ideas were forthcoming they took it out of him in labour.  He was too busy and too happy to notice what Desmond was doing.

One day Vera said to him, “Nicky, do you know that Desmond is going about a good deal with Alfred Orde-Jones?”

“Is she?  Is there any reason why she shouldn’t?”

“Not unless you call Orde-Jones a reason.”

“You mean I’ve got to stop it?  How can I?”

“You can’t.  Nothing can stop Desmond.”

“What do you think I ought to do about it?”

“Nothing.  She goes about with scores of people.  It doesn’t follow that there’s anything in it.”

“Oh, Lord, I should hope not!  That beastly bounder.  What could there be in it?”

“He’s a clever painter, Nicky.  So’s Desmond.  There’s that in it.”

“I’ve hardly a right to object to that, have I?  It’s not as if I were a clever painter myself.”

But as he walked home between the white-walled gardens of St. John’s Wood, and through Regent’s Park and Baker Street, and down the north side of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, he worried the thing to shreds.

There couldn’t be anything in it.

He could see Alfred Orde-Jones—­the raking swagger of the tall lean body in the loose trousers, the slouch hat and the flowing tie.  He could see his flowing black hair and his haggard, eccentric face with its seven fantastic accents, the black eyebrows, the black moustache, the high, close-clipped side whiskers, the two forks of the black beard.

There couldn’t be anything in it.

Orde-Jones’s mouth was full of rotten teeth.

And yet he never came home rather later than usual without saying to himself, “Supposing I was to find him there with her?”