“Poor little Desmond.”

“Oh, Nicky, do you think me a beast?  Does it make you hate me?”

“No.  Of course it doesn’t.  The only awful thing is—­”

“What?  Tell me.”

“Well—­you see—­”

“You mean the baby?  I know it’s awful.  You needn’t tell me that, Nicky.”

He stared at her.

“I mean it’s so awful for it.”

She thought he had been thinking of himself and her.

“Why should it be?”

“Why?  There isn’t any why.  It just is.  I know it is.”

He was thinking of Veronica.

“You see,” he said simply, “that’s why this sort of thing is such a rotten game.  It’s so hard on the kiddy.  I suppose you didn’t think of that.  You couldn’t have, or else you wouldn’t—­”

He paused.  There was one thing he had to know.  He must get it out of her.

“It hasn’t made you feel that you don’t want it?”

“Oh—­I don’t know what I want—­now.  I don’t know what it makes me feel!”

“Don’t let it, Desmond.  Don’t let it.  It’ll be all right.  You won’t feel like that when you’ve married me.  Can’t you see that that’s the wonderful and beautiful part?”

“What is?” she said in her tired drawl.

“It—­the poor kiddy.”

Because he remembered Veronica he was going to marry Desmond.

* * * * *

Veronica’s mother was the first to hear about it.  Desmond told her.

Veronica’s mother was determined to stop it for the sake of everybody concerned.

She wrote to Nicholas and asked him to come and dine with her one evening when Lawrence Stephen was dining somewhere else. (Lawrence Stephen made rather a point of not going to houses where Vera was not received; but sometimes, when the occasion was political, or otherwise important, he had to.  That was her punishment, as Bartholomew had meant that it should be.)

Nicky knew what he had been sent for, and to all his aunt’s assaults and manoeuvres he presented an inexpugnable front.

“You mustn’t do it; you simply mustn’t.”

He intimated that his marriage was his own affair.

“It isn’t.  It’s the affair of everybody who cares for you.”

“Their caring isn’t my affair,” said Nicky.

And then Vera began to say things about Desmond.

“It’s absurd of you,” she said, “to treat her as if she was an innocent child.  She isn’t a child, and she isn’t innocent.  She knew perfectly well what she was about.  There’s nothing she doesn’t know.  She meant it to happen, and she made it happen.  She said she would.  She meant you to marry her, and she’s making you marry her.  I daresay she said she would.  She’s as clever and determined as the devil.  Neither you nor Headley Richards ever had a chance against her.”

“She hasn’t got a dog’s chance against all you people yelping at her now she’s down.  I should have thought—­”