It was late afternoon when they wound up the discussion as to what Dick should do, he must be most kind and yet eliminate himself. When the doctors stood up at last, Dick’s eyes fell outside the window to where a light rain was falling — Nicole was waiting, expectant, somewhere in that rain. When, presently, he went out buttoning his oil-skin at the throat, pulling down the brim of his hat, he came upon her immediately under the roof of the main entrance.

“I know a new place we can go,” she said. “When I was ill I didn’t mind sitting inside with the others in the evening — what they said seemed like everything else. Naturally now I see them as ill and it’s — it’s —”

“You’ll be leaving soon.”

“Oh, soon. My sister, Beth, but she’s always been called Baby, she’s coming in a few weeks to take me somewhere; after that I’ll be back here for a last month.”

“The older sister?”

“Oh, quite a bit older. She’s twenty-four — she’s very English. She lives in London with my father’s sister. She was engaged to an Englishman but he was killed — I never saw him.”

Her face, ivory gold against the blurred¹ sunset that strove through the rain, had a promise Dick had never seen before: the high cheek- bones, the faintly wan² quality, cool rather than feverish³, was reminiscent of the frame of a promising⁴ colt — a creature whose life did not promise to be only a projection⁵ of youth upon a grayer screen, but instead, a true growing; the face would be handsome in middle life; it would be handsome in old age: the essential structure and the economy were there.

“What are you looking at?”

“I was just thinking that you’re going to be rather happy.”

Nicole was frightened: “Am I? All right — things couldn’t be worse than they have been.”

In the covered woodshed to which she had led him, she sat cross- legged upon her golf shoes, her burberry wound about her and her cheeks stung alive by the damp air. Gravely she returned his gaze, taking in his somewhat proud carriage that never quite yielded to the wooden post against which he leaned; she looked into his face that always tried to discipline itself into molds of

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