a
funny chap who _knows_ he's going to have collywobbles as soon as he
gets out into the open.

But that isn't a bit what I mean. They're all wrong about it, because
they make it turn on killing, and not on your chance of being killed.
_That_--when you realize it--well, it's like the thing you told me about
that you said you thought must be God because it's so real. I didn't
understand it then, but I do now. You're bang up against reality--you're
going clean into it--and the sense of it's exquisite. Of course, while
one half of you is feeling like that, the other half is fighting to kill
and doing its best to keep on _this_ side reality. But I've been near
enough to the other side to know. And I wish Michael's friend would come
out and see what it's like for himself. Or, better still, Mick. _He_'d
write a poem about it that would make you sit up. It's a sin that I
should be getting all this splendid stuff when I can't do anything
with it.

Love to all of them and to your darling self.--Always your loving,

NICKY.

P.S.-I wish you'd try to get some notion of it into Dad and Dorothy and
Mother. It would save them half the misery they're probably
going through.

* * * * *

The gardener had gone to the War, and Veronica was in the garden,
weeding the delphinium border.

It was Sunday afternoon and she was alone there. Anthony was digging in
the kitchen garden, and Frances was with him, gathering green peas and
fruit for the hospital. Every now and then she came through the open
door on to the flagged path of the upper terrace with the piled up
baskets in her arms, and she smiled and nodded to Veronica.

It was quiet in the garden, so that, when her moment came, Veronica
could time it by the striking of the clock heard through the open
doorway of the house: four strokes; and the half-hour; and then, almost
on the stroke, her rush of pure, mysterious happiness.

Up till then she had been only tranquil; and her tranquillity made each
small act exquisite and delightful, as her fingers tugged at the weeds,
and shook the earth from their weak roots, and the palms of her hand
smoothed over the places where they had been. She thought of old Jean
and Suzanne, planting flowers in the garden at Renton, and of that
tranquillity of theirs that was the saddest thing she had ever seen.

And her happiness had come, almost on the stroke of the half-hour, not
out of herself or out of her thou