eople; I mean I care
more for you."

She closed and clinched it. "That's why you're not to bother about me,
Nicky. If _the_ most awful thing happened, and you didn't come back, It
would come."

"I wish I knew what It was," he said.

"I don't know what it is. But it's so real that I think it's God."

"That's why _they're_ so magnificently brave--Dorothy and Aunt Frances
and all of them. They don't believe in it; they don't know it's there;
even Michael doesn't know it's there--yet; and still they go on bearing
and bearing; and they were glad to give you up."

"I know," he said; "lots of people _say_ they're glad, but they really
_are_ glad."

He meditated.

"There's one thing. I can't think what you do, unless it's praying or
something; and if you're going to turn it on to me, Ronny, I wish you'd
be careful; because it seems to me that if there's anything in it at
all, there might be hitches. I mean to say, you might work it just
enough to keep me from being killed but not enough to keep my legs from
being blown off. Or the Boches might get me fair enough and you might
bring me back, all paralysed and idiotic.

"That's what I should funk. I should funk it most damnably, if I thought
about it. Luckily one doesn't think."

"But, Nicky, I shouldn't try to keep you back then any more than I tried
before."

"You wouldn't? Honour bright?"

"Of course I wouldn't. It wouldn't be playing the game. To begin with, I
won't believe that you're not going to get through.

"But if you didn't--if you didn't come back--I still wouldn't believe
you'd gone. I should say, 'He hasn't cared. He's gone on to something
else. It doesn't end him.'"

He was silent. The long rampart of the hill, as he stared at it, made a
pattern on his mind; a pattern that he paid no attention to.

Veronica followed the direction of his eyes. "Do you mind talking about
it?" she said.

"Me? Rather not. It sort of interests me. I don't know whether I believe
in your thing or not; but I've always had that feeling, that you go on.
You don't stop; you can't stop. That's why I don't care. They used to
think I was trying to be funny when I said I didn't care. But I really
didn't. Things, most things, don't much matter, because there's always
something else. You go on to it.

"I care for _you_. _You_ matter most awfully; and my people; but most of
all you. You always have mattered to me more than anything, since the
first time I heard you calling out