“Of course, if you’ll let me divorce you for desertion, it would be very nice of you.  That,” said Desmond, “is what decent people do.”

He went out and telephoned to his father.  Then he left her and went back to his father’s house.

Desmond asked the servant to remember particularly that it was the fifteenth of June and that the master was going away and would not come back again.

* * * * *

As Nicky walked up the hill and across the Heath, he wondered why it had happened, and why, now that it had happened, he cared so little.  He could have understood it if he hadn’t cared at all for Desmond.  But he had cared in a sort of way.  If she had cared at all for him he thought they might have made something of it, something enduring, perhaps, if they had had children of their own.

He still couldn’t think why it had happened.  But he knew that, even if he had loved Desmond with passion, it wouldn’t have been the end of him.  The part of him that didn’t care, that hadn’t cared much when he lost his Moving Fortress, was the part that Desmond never would have cared for.

He didn’t know whether it was outside him and beyond him, bigger and stronger than he was, or whether it was deep inside, the most real part of him.  Whatever happened or didn’t happen it would go on.

How could he have ended here, with poor little Desmond?  There was something ahead of him, something that he felt to be tremendous and holy.  He had always known it waited for him.  He was going out to meet it; and because of it he didn’t care.

And after a year of Desmond he was glad to go back to his father’s house; even though he knew that the thing that waited for him was not there.

Frances and Anthony were happy again.  After all, Heaven had manipulated their happiness with exquisite art and wisdom, letting Michael and Nicholas go from them for a little while that they might have them again more completely, and teaching them the art and wisdom that would keep them.

Some day the children would marry; even Nicky might marry again.  They would prepare now, by small daily self-denials, for the big renunciation that must come.

Yet in secret they thought that Michael would never marry; that Nicky, made prudent by disaster, wasn’t really likely to marry again.  John would marry; and they would be happy in John’s happiness and in John’s children.

And Nicky had not been home before he offered to his parents the spectacle of an outrageous gaiety.  You would have said that life to Nicholas was an amusing game where you might win or lose, but either way it didn’t matter.  It was a rag, a sell.  Even the preceedings, the involved and ridiculous proceedings of his divorce, amused him.

It was undeniably funny that he should be supposed to have deserted Desmond.

Frances wondered, again, whether Nicky really had any feelings, and whether things really made any impression on him.