I was there alone. I got work for Cothope with the Ilchesters, for whom
I now build these destroyers. They wanted him at once, and he was short
of money, so I let him go and managed very philosophically by myself.
But I found it hard to fix my attention on aeronautics, I had been away
from the work for a full half-year and more, a half-year crowded with
intense disconcerting things. For a time my brain refused these fine
problems of balance and adjustment altogether; it wanted to think about
my uncle's dropping jaw, my aunt's reluctant tears, about dead negroes
and pestilential swamps, about the evident realities of cruelty and
pain, about life and death. Moreover, it was weary with the frightful
pile of figures and documents at the Hardingham, a task to which this
raid to Lady Grove was simply an interlude. And there was Beatrice.
On the second morning, as I sat out upon the veranda recalling memories
and striving in vain to attend to some too succinct pencil notes of
Cothope's, Beatrice rode up suddenly from behind the pavilion, and
pulled rein and became still; Beatrice, a little flushed from riding and
sitting on a big black horse.
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