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A solid, determined mass of people waiting patient hours to see the khaki-clads go by. Three years of indefatigable reading had brought them to a clear knowledge of what these boys were going to. "Isn't it dreadful!" Stell gasped. "Nicky Overton's only nineteen, thank goodness." Their car was caught in the jam. When they moved at all it was by inches.
She had forgotten Nicky's tenderness, and she knew nothing at all about Desmond's fright. And, as it happened, neither Nicky nor Desmond did any of the things she thought they would do. Nicky was not impetuous. He found Desmond in her studio working on the last drawing of the Moving Fortress, with the finished model before her. That gave him his opening, and he approached shyly and tentatively.
And even if he had known that she had lied, he couldn't very well have given it against poor pretty Peggy who had lost her head and got frightened. As Nicky packed up his clothes and his books he said, "I don't care if I am sent down. It would have been fifty times worse for her than it is for me." He had no idea how bad it was, nor how much worse it was going to be.
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.
"Get Charliet; all the guns and ammunition he can steal; hold this place and harry Macartney," I supposed. "What do you think?" I had turned to Paulette, but she only shook her head with an, "I don't know, Mr. Stretton!" I had time to decide she had only called me Nicky by mistake six hours ago, before Collins disagreed with me flatly. "Stay here? Not much! Won't work Macartney'd drop on us!
There's only me and Nicky...." But Archelaus never spoke again. He lay and gazed as though he were struggling for speech; in his eyes struggled the tortured questioning of the inarticulate.
The dying man flung a failing hand out to Nicky, and his eyes were on him when what light still lingered in them faded and went out.
Run to the terrace and see if Grannie and the Aunties are coming." He ran. It was half a child's run and half a full-grown boy's. Then Mrs. Anthony addressed her daughter. "Why did you say his ear's aching when it isn't?" "Because," said Dorothy, "it is aching." She was polite and exquisite and obstinate, like Anthony. "Nicky ought to know his own ear best.
It's happened before, and when you get near to it again you know what it is. You keep on wanting to get near it, wanting it to happen again. You may lose it the next minute, but you know. Lawrence knew what it was. Nicky knew. June 19th. I'm coming back to it after that interruption because I want to get the thing clear. I have to put it down as I feel it; there's no other way.
You could never tell what Nicky would take it into his head to do. There was no guile in Michael. But sometimes there was guile in Nicky. Frances was always on the look out for Nicky's guile. So when Michael remarked that Grannie and the Aunties would be there immediately and Nicky said, "Mummy, I think my ear is going to ache," her answer was "You won't have to stay more than a minute, darling."
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