Frances's heart ached when she looked at her.
"If I could only help you."
"You can't, Mummy ducky," she would say. And she would get up and leave the room where Frances was. Sometimes she would go to Veronica; but more often she hid away somewhere by herself.
Frances thought: "She is out of my reach. I can't get at her. She'll go to anybody rather than to me. It used to be Rosalind. Now it's Veronica."
But Dorothy could not speak about Drayton to her mother. Only to Veronica, trying to comfort her, she said, "I could bear it if he'd been killed in an attack. But to go straight, like that, into the retreat. He couldn't have had five hours' fighting.
"And to be killed--Retreating.
"He got nothing out of it but agony."
Veronica said, "How do you know he got nothing out of it? You don't know what he may have got in the last minute of it."
"Ronny, I don't believe I should mind so much if I were going out to Flanders--if there was the least little chance of a bullet getting me. But I gave him my word I wouldn't go.
"Do you think I'm bound by that--now?"