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 thoughts, but mysteriously and from somewhere a long way off. * * * * * She turned to nod and smile at Frances who was coming through the door with her basket, and it was then that she saw Nicholas. He stood on something that looked like a low wall, raised between her and the ash-tree; he stood motionless, as if arrested in the act of looking back to see if she were following him. His eyes shone, vivid and blue, as they always shone when he was happy. He smiled at her, but with no movement of his mouth. He shouted to her, but with no sound.