Trenchard was another matter.

Nikitin seemed to me for the first time in my knowledge of him to come down from his idealistic dreaming.

He cared for Trenchard like a child, but never obtrusively.

Trenchard seemed to appreciate it, but there was something about him that I did not like.

His nerves were tensely strained, he did his work with his eyes fixed upon some impossible distance, he often did not hear us when we spoke to him.
And so the three of us formed a kind of hedge about him to protect him, a hedge of which he was perfectly unconscious.