unhappy in this world."

She began to cry quietly.

"Desmond--what is it? What is it? Tell me. Why can't you tell me?"

* * * * *

She thought, "It will be all right if he kisses me once. If he holds me
in his arms once. Then I can tell him."

For then he would know that he loved her. He was not quite sure now. She
knew that he was not quite sure. She trusted to the power of her body to
make him sure.

Her youth neither understood his youth, nor allowed for it, nor pitied
it.

He had kissed her. He had held her in his arms and kissed her more than
once while she cried there, hiding her face in the hollow of his arm.
She was weak and small. She was like some small, soft, helpless animal
and she was hurt. Her sobbing and panting made her ribs feel fragile
like the ribs of some small, soft, helpless animal under the pressure of
his arms. And she was frightened.

He couldn't stand the sight of suffering. He had never yet resisted the
appeal of small, weak, helpless things in fright and pain. He could feel
Desmond's heart going thump, thump, under the blue thing he called her
pinafore. Her heart hurt him with its thumping.

And through all his painful pity he knew that her skin was smooth and
sweet like a sallow-white rose-leaf. And Desmond knew that he knew it.
His mouth slid with an exquisite slipperiness over the long, polished
bands of her black hair; and he thought that he loved her. Desmond knew
that he thought it.

And still she waited. She said to herself, "It's no good his thinking
it. I daren't tell him till he says it. Till he asks me to marry him."

* * * * *

He had said it at last. And he had asked her to marry him. And then she
had told him.

And all that he said was, "I don't care." He said it to Desmond, and he
said it to himself.

The funny thing was that he did not care. He was as miserable as it was
well possible to be, but he didn't really care. He was not even
surprised. It was as if the knowledge of it had been hiding in the back
of his head behind all the ideas.

And yet he couldn't have known it all the time. Either it must have gone
away when his ideas went, or he must have been trying not to see it.

She had slipped from his arms and stood before him, dabbing her mouth
and eyes now and then with her pocket-handkerchief, controlling herself,
crying quietly.

She knew, what had not dawned on Nicky yet, that he didn't