king of
him.

"Then Ronny knows?" said Frances.

"Of course she knows. _You_ aren't going to try to stop me, Mother?"

"No," she said. "I'm not going to try to stop you--this time."

She thought: "If I hadn't stopped him seven years ago, he would be safe
now, with the Army in India."

One by one they got up and said "Good night" to each other.

But Nicholas came to Michael in his room.

He said to him: "I say, Mick, don't you worry about not enlisting. At
any rate, _not yet_. Don't worry about Don and Daddy. They won't take
Don because he's got a mitral murmur in his heart that he doesn't know
about. He's going to be jolly well sold, poor chap. And they won't take
the guv'nor because he's too old; though the dear old thing thinks he
can bluff them into it because he doesn't look it.

"And look here--don't worry about me. As far as I'm concerned, the War's
a blessing in disguise. I always wanted to go into the Army. You know
how I loathed it when they went and stopped me. Now I'm going in and
nobody--not even mother--really wants to keep me out. Soon they'll all
be as pleased as Punch about it.

"And I sort of know how you feel about the War. You don't want to stick
bayonets into German tummies, just _because_ they're so large and oodgy.
You'd think of that first and all the time and afterwards. And I shan't
think of it at all.

"Besides, you disapprove of the War for all sorts of reasons that I
can't get hold of. But it's like this--you couldn't respect yourself if
you went into it; and I couldn't respect myself if I stayed out."

"I wonder," Michael said, "if you really see it."

"Of course I see it. That's the worst of you clever writing chaps. You
seem to think nobody can ever see anything except yourselves."

When he had left him Michael thought: "I wonder if he really does see?
Or if he made it all up?"

They had not said to each other all that they had really meant. Of
Nicky's many words there were only two that he remembered vividly,
"Not yet."

Again he felt the horror of the great empty space opened up between him
and Nicky, deep and still and soundless, but for the two words:
"Not yet."

XX

It was as Nicholas had said. Anthony and John were rejected; Anthony on
account of his age, John because of the mitral murmur that he didn't
know about.

The guv'nor had lied, John said, like a good 'un; swore he was under
thirty-five and stuck to it. He might have had a chance if he'd left it