choose. You know you'll have to"--escaping
thought and language, had expressed itself in one suffocating pang.
Unless Nicky's affair staved off the dreadful moment.

"Were you frightfully busy?"

"No, thank goodness."

The luck she had had! Of course, if he had been busy he couldn't
possibly have come.

She could look at him now without a tightening in her throat. She liked
to look at him. He was made all of one piece. She liked his square face
and short fine hair, both the colour of light-brown earth; his eyes, the
colour of light brown earth under clear water; eyes that looked small
because they were set so deep. She liked their sudden narrowing and
their deep wrinkles when he smiled. She liked his jutting chin, and the
fine, rather small mouth that jerked his face slightly crooked when he
laughed. She liked that slender crookedness that made it a face
remarkable and unique among faces. She liked his brains. She liked all
that she had ever seen or heard of him.

Vera had told them that once, at an up-country station in India, he had
stopped a mutiny in a native battery by laughing in the men's faces.
Somebody that Ferdie knew had been with him and saw it happen. The men
broke into his office where he was sitting, vulnerably, in his
shirt-sleeves. They had brought knives with them, beastly native things,
and they had their hands on the handles, ready. They screamed and
gesticulated with excitement. And Frank Drayton leaned back in his
office chair and looked at them, and burst out laughing, because, he
said, they made such funny faces. When they got to fingering their
knives, he tilted back his chair and rocked with laughter. His sudden,
incredible mirth frightened them and stopped the mutiny. She could see
him, she could see his face jerked crooked with delight.

That was the sort of thing that Nicky would have done. She loved him for
that. She loved him because he was like Nicky.

She was not able to recall the process of the states that flowered in
that mysterious sense of well-being and exaltation. A year ago Frank
Drayton had been only "that nice man we used to meet at Cheltenham."
First of all he had been Ferdie's and Vera's friend. Then he became
Nicky's friend; the only one who took a serious interest in his
inventions and supported him when he wanted to go into the Army and
consoled him when he was frustrated. Then he had become the friend of
the family. Now he was recognized as more particularly Dorot