I tried to say as casually as I could that Miss Thesiger had wired to me that she was staying in that hotel with her people.

The little bounder then intimated that when he saw Miss Thesiger her people were less conspicuous than Jevons.

I replied that that was probably the reason why they'd asked me to join them when I'd seen Ghent.

Withers advised me to go on seeing Ghent if I wanted to be popular. They—Jevons and Miss Thesiger—didn't look at all as if they wanted to be seen, much less joined.

He had the air of knowing a good deal more than he cared to tell me; but then he always had that air; you may say he lived on it.

I asked him presently (in a suitable context) whether he was going back soon; and to my relief I learned that he had only just come out—for his paper—and was going on into Germany through Brussels. He wouldn't be back in England for another three weeks or more.

He wouldn't be back, I reflected, to tell what he knew or what he didn't know, till Reggie Thesiger had sailed.

I got rid of the little beast on the first likely pretext, having dealt with him so urbanely that he couldn't possibly think he had told me anything I saw reason to believe and therefore to resent.

Then I went back to Bruges.

This time my quest was fairly easy. I didn't know what hotel Jevons was staying in; but I did know the sort of hotel that Withers stayed in when he was travelling for his paper. My errand was narrowed down to three or four (good, but not too good), and the first I struck in the Market-Place was Withers's hotel. It was one of those that three days ago had known nothing of Jevons.

I inquired this time for Withers and was told that he had left that morning. I engaged a room and strolled out into the Market-Place. I visited the Cathedral, the Belfry, and the Beguinage, in the hope of coming suddenly across Viola and Jevons.

I did not come across them in any of those places; but I was not very earnest about the search. I was so sure that if Withers had not lied to me they would presently come across me at their hotel. I meant that it should be that way, if possible: that they should come across me in a place where they could not evade me. God only knows what I meant to say to them when they had found me.

As I entered the hotel again I saw the proprietor's wife make a sign to her husband. They conferred together, and sent the concierge upstairs after me. He wanted to know if I was the gentleman who had inquired the other day for Mr. Chevons, because, if I was, Mr. Chevons had arrived the day before yesterday and was staying in the hotel.

There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the visitors' list.

Viola's was not.

From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.

And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had for lying to me, I concluded that he had lied.

Or perhaps—it was more than likely—he had been mistaken.

Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in Bruges, Viola would probably be with him. I chose a table by the door behind a screen, where I could see everybody as they came in without being seen first of all by anybody.

Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.

I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern gate of the city. He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet and looking into the water. Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons—the trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets—were indistinct. But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture that I could see his dejection, his despair. The posture ought to have disarmed me, but it didn't.

He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his ground. It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said.

I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that little beast Withers.

I said, "I daresay you did. I saw Withers this morning."

He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.

I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.

"I see," he said. "He's told you."

I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.

"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."

I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.

"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."

He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his calmness was the measure of his trust in me.

"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."

I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.

He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than—it isn't half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like the main sewer of this city."

He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness, as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.

"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's. You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."

"He said that she—that you were staying together in the same hotel."

"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to it?"

I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to let Jevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.

We went back.

We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said quietly:

"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some ladies."

"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "you did bring her."

He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.

"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."

"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"

(I had to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)

We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place, talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.

He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following. She came."

"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."

"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."

"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."

He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.

"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew. But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."

* * * * *

He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would make it all right. He had just realized—he had only just, after six days of it, mind you, realized—that he had compromised her. I said I supposed he realized it after Withers had seen them?

He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it would do her good to cut everything—all the mimsy tosh she'd been brought up in and hated—to get out of it all—just to do one splendid bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.

We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.

Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if he had murdered Viola.

And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round her, he asserted persistently his innocence.

"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges—the Belfry."

I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry without you?"

He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way, Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at all."

"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."

"It wouldn't have been the same thing for her. I wasn't thinking only of myself. Who does?"

It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.

At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had done me about the worst injury that one man can do to another—at any rate, I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous. But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have felt.

He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his life—far from it—but because advertisement in these affairs was undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account alone.

He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on the line that would be taken.

He said quietly, "The word thundering is singularly inappropriate. There's nothing thundering about me. I haven't calculated anything. As for hushing it up, I'm hushing it up myself, thank you. Haven't I told you I'm going to-morrow? Can't you see that I'm packing?"

He had evidently been trying to pack.

"And what," I asked, "is Miss Thesiger doing?"

"She's staying on here by herself a bit. In the pension. As if she'd come by herself."

He seemed entirely satisfied with his plan.

I said, "Look here, Jevons, that won't do. It's no good your going. You've been seen here. You're supposed to be staying in this hotel together. If you go and she stays—in that pension—you've deserted her. You've seduced her. You're tired of her—in five days—and you've left her."

"You don't suppose I have really?" said Jevons.

"I don't suppose anything. I don't know what you've done. I don't think I want to know. That's what it'll look like. Do, for God's sake, remember you've been seen."

He gathered a portion of his cheek into his mouth and sucked it.

"I suppose," he said, "it would look like that."

I said of course it would. And he asked me then, quite humbly, what I thought he'd better do.

I said I thought he'd better do exactly what I told him. He was to stay here till Captain Thesiger had sailed for India (I wasn't going to let him get back to England till Reggie was out of it). Miss Thesiger was to go back to her people to-morrow, and he was not to see her or write to her before she went.

He asked me was I thinking of taking her back myself?

I said I wasn't. Miss Thesiger had behaved as if she had disappeared. There was no good in my behaving as if she had disappeared with me.

That seemed to pacify him.

I said I should take her to Ostend to-morrow and put her on board the boat. I could see that he didn't at all care about this part of the programme, but his intelligence accepted the whole as the best thing that could be done in the circumstances.

Then I left him to his misery and went round to the pension to see Viola.

All my instincts revolted against what I had to do.

* * * * *

She has since told me that I did it beautifully. I don't, of course, believe her, and it doesn't matter. The wonder is how I did it at all.

To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize our encounter, that was how I saw her—crouching and flinching in a corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally, that was what I had to tell her.

The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the affair—to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in Bruges alone.

And that—if she had only let me—was what I tried to do.

I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.

I found her in her room at the pension. It was at the back, on the ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood by the stove.

Somehow, when I saw these things—especially the shoes—my heart melted inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.

I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.

The garcon of the pension closed the door of this room in my face as he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be unpleasant."

But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued, but curiously reassuring cry.

She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her voice recalled me.

"Wally—how ripping! However did you get here?"

I don't know what I said. I probably didn't say anything. The sheer surprise of it so staggered me that I must have muttered or grunted or choked instead. But I know I took her hand and did my best to smile back at her with the stiff mouth she noticed later.

She went on: "I am glad to see you. Have you had any dinner?"

I said I had.

"Then," she said, "let's sit in the garden."

I took her hat off a chair and stuck it on a bust on the bureau (Viola laughed). I set the chair on the flagged path of the garden.

"Have you had coffee?" she said then.

I had.

"So have I. But I haven't had it in the garden. We'll have some more."

I rang for coffee.

We sat down and faced each other. She was smiling again as if the delight of seeing me fairly bubbled out of her. One thing struck me then, that at this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she was travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over Withers and his story.

Then she said, "Have you come across Mr. Jevons yet? He's here."

I answered, with what I knew to be a very stiff mouth, "We're staying in the same hotel."

"You might have brought him along with you," she said.

I said I didn't want to bring him along with me.

She raised her eyebrows in delicate reproof of my rudeness and said, "Why not?"

"Because," I said, "I want to talk to you."

"Oh—" I don't think I imagined the faint embarrassment in her tone. But it was very faint.

"And" I went on, "I don't want to talk about Jevons."

She looked at me then steadily. The look held me, then defied me to pass beyond a certain limit. I understood now the terms of our encounter. As long as I met her on the ground of a friendship that recognized and included Jevons she was glad to treat with me; but any attitude that repudiated Jevons, or merely ignored him, was a hostile attitude that she was prepared to resent.

"What has he done?" she said.

"I don't know what he's done." I paused. "Why drag in Jevons?"

"Because," she said, "it's his last night. He's going to-morrow."

I said, "And it's my first night. And as it happens he isn't going to-morrow. He's arranged to stay here another fortnight."

Her face softened. "Then it's all right," she said.

I had to dash her down from that ground and I did it at once.

I said, "I saw your brother the other day."

I could see her face darken then with a flush of pain. We were sitting close to the window, and the light from the room inside showed me all the changes of her face.

She asked, "What day?"

"Let me see. This is Friday. It must have been Monday. I came over that night, as soon as I'd seen him."

"What did you go and see him for?"

"I didn't go. He came to see me."

She looked at me again, if possible, more steadily than before, but without defiance. It was as if she were measuring the extent of my loyalty before she committed herself again to speech.

"Why did he come?" she asked presently.

"He wanted to know if I knew where you were."

"You didn't know," she said.

"I didn't or I wouldn't have lost three days in looking for you. But I made a good shot, anyhow, when I came to Bruges."

Even in her anguish—for she was in anguish—she smiled at the wonder of my shot.

"What made you think of Bruges?"

"I don't know."

I couldn't tell her what had made me think of it. I couldn't tell her that I had tracked her down through Jevons. I was going to keep him out of it, if she would only let me. But she wouldn't.

"I suppose," she meditated gently, "he must have told you."

I answered quite sternly this time, to impress on her the propriety of keeping Jevons out of it:

"He didn't tell me anything."

"Then"—she was still puzzled—"what made you come?"

"You."

"Me?"

"Your brother, if you like."

"He should have come himself."

"That," I said, "is what I'm trying to prevent. He doesn't know you're here. I want to get you back to England before he does know. Besides—he's sailing for India next week."

Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.

"Didn't you know?" I said.

"I suppose I must have known—once."

Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign, that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and traditions she had been brought up in—codes and traditions might well have been nothing to Viola—it had struck at her strongest affection and her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week; she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.

Her confession was not made to me (she had forgotten my existence utterly); it was made to herself—the old self that had adored Reggie; that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange, perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering, rather, of secret, agonized discovery.

"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.

Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.

"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you to Ostend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."

"Is that what you came for?"

"Yes."

"It was awfully nice of you."

"There was nothing else," I said, "to do."

"You're coming with me to Canterbury." She stated it.

"No, my dear child," I said, "I am not. You don't want them to think you went to Bruges with me."

This was by implication a reference to Jevons. It was as near as I had let myself get to him.

She said, "What are you going to do, then?"

"I'm going to put you on the boat at Ostend, and then I'm coming back here."

It must have been at this point that the garcon brought the coffee. For I remember our sitting out there and drinking it amicably until the aroma of it gave Viola an idea.

"What time shall we have to start to-morrow?"

I said, "First thing in the morning."

"Then," she said, "it does seem a pity not to send for Jimmy."

I could see now that there was some deadly purpose in her persistence. But this time I couldn't bear it, and I lost my temper.

I said, "Send for him. Send for him, if you can't live ten minutes without him."

I was sorry even at the time; I have been ashamed since. For, so far from resenting my abominable rudeness—as, under any conclusion, she had a perfect right to—she merely said, "I'm only thinking that if I've got to go so soon to-morrow it'll be horribly lonely for him over there."

"He doesn't expect to see you. We arranged all that."

She pondered it, still with that curious absence of resentment. It was as if, recognizing the danger of the situation, she submitted to any steps, however disagreeable, that were necessary for her safety. It was clear that she trusted me; less clear that she trusted Jevons.

One thing remained mysterious to her.

"What are you coming back here for?" she asked.

I let her have it straight: "To look after Jevons."

"What do you suppose he'd do?"

"He might get into England before your brother got out of it."

She smiled. "What do you suppose, then, Reggie'd do?"

I said I knew what I'd do if I were Reggie.

She smiled again. "I see. You're saving him from Reggie."

"I'm not thinking of him, I can assure you."

At that she said, "Dear Wally, so you think you're saving me."

"I'm trying to," I said. "As far as your people are concerned. You don't want them to know you've been here. If you'll only leave it to me, they won't know."

"I'm not going to lie about it. I shall tell them if they ask me."

"Not Reggie," I said.

"Yes, Reggie. If he asks me. Reggie's the very last person I should think of lying to."

It was this attitude of hers that first shook me in my conclusions. For I'm afraid I'd come to certain very definite conclusions.

Why, I asked her, hadn't she told them before she came?

"Because," she said, "there's no use worrying them. They'd have tried to stop me. You can't imagine what an awful fuss they'd have made. I daresay I might never have got off at all."

What I couldn't understand was her attitude. I mean I couldn't reconcile the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.

Her manner was supremely assured.

It wasn't, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that I couldn't have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and blundering. In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment when I upset her by telling her about Reggie's sailing, she showed an extraordinary tranquillity.

But as I couldn't understand her I simply said, "I wish you hadn't got off."

She said in that same quiet way, "I had to."

"Because," I said, "he made you."

Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in. I wasn't going to keep him out now to spare her. I had a right to know the truth. She had shaken my conclusions. She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know. I was determined to know now and end it. That shows that I must have trusted her; that I knew she wouldn't lie to me.

"But," she said, with the least perceptible surprise, "he didn't make me."

"He told me he did."

"He told you?—What did he say exactly?"

"He said—if you must know—that he hadn't brought you, but that he had made you come."

"He didn't. He didn't really. But supposing he had—what then?"

"You want me to tell you what I think of it?"

"Yes."

"I think it was a beastly thing to make you do. He couldn't have done it—you know he couldn't have done it—if he hadn't been a bit of a blackguard."

I was going to say, "as well as a bounder"; but I didn't want to rub that in. I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be full enough without my pouring.

"But, you see," she said, still peaceably, "he didn't do it. He only said he did. That was his niceness. He wanted to save me."

"My dear child, if it's saving you to bring you out here without your people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him everywhere—"

"He didn't bring me. He said he wished I could come with him. And I said I wished I could. I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn't. Then he went off by himself. He was all right till he got to Bruges. Then he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week without seeing any more of it, because he couldn't bear to know what I was missing. He was going to keep the other places till we could see them together. So I wired to say I was coming, and I came."

"What did you do it for, Viola?"

"Wally, I asked myself that as soon as I got into the train. And it wasn't till I was half across the Channel that I knew why."

She stopped and stared as if at the wonder of herself explained.

"I did it to burn my boats."

I suppose I stared at that. For she expounded:

"To make it impossible to go back."

I said, "My dear child, that was very reckless of you."

She said she wanted to be reckless. I asked her if it didn't occur to her that some day she might want her boats?

She said: No. It was just her boats that she was afraid of. She didn't really want them. She didn't want—really—to go back.

Then she looked at me and said, "You know Jimmy wants to marry me." And then, "Did you know?"

I said I was not in Jevons's confidence, but I had guessed as much. I said, "Do you want to marry him?"

She said, "Yes. I want to marry him more than anything. I don't want to marry anybody else. I never shall marry anybody else. Most of me wants to marry Jimmy. But there's a little bit of me that doesn't. It's mean and snobbish—and dreadful, and it's afraid to marry him. And, you see, if I were to go to my people and say, 'I'm not going to marry Mr. Furnival; I'm going to marry Mr. Jevons,' and I were to show Jimmy to them, they'd all get up and side with that horrid and shameful little bit of me. Reggie would, too. It wouldn't be in the least horrid or snobbish of them, you know, because they wouldn't know what Jimmy's really like. They're just very fastidious and correct. But it's simply awful of me, because I do know."

"It isn't awful. It simply means that he isn't your sort. You're fastidious and correct. You can't marry him, and you know it. You won't be able to bear it. He'll make you shudder all down your spine."

"All that doesn't prevent my caring for him. I care for him more than for anything on earth, even Reggie. That's why I've burned my boats. So that I may have what I care for without their tearing me to pieces over it."

So far was I from understanding her that it struck me that what she was telling me was as ugly a thing as could be told in words; that she was confessing that, being too weak to stand up against her family, she had deliberately compromised herself with Jevons so that she might marry him without their opposition; just as I was sure that Jevons had compromised her so that he could marry her without opposition from herself.

"But—what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know how horrible it is."

So far was she from understanding me that she answered: "Yes, it is horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if I were really like that."

You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an event to her altogether beautiful—the destruction of the cowardice that would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her soul dared.

This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.

That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't have believed it possible that people did these things.

What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see, till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for ages.

If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it would have been so cruel to herself, too.

Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp, then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their traces, a day behind them at each city.)

And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly before.

Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts me."

I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.

She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here now, Furny."

I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover, and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform at Canterbury.

"Oh," she said. "You have to take some risk!"

We were on the gangway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it was you I went off with. They won't mind that half so much."

I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.

It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says you didn't make her come. She proposed coming herself."

He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't likely she'd propose a thing like that."

His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come to him.

Well, I suppose in a sense he had made her.



IV

We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it. He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.

He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence, as if Viola hadn't given it me already.

It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed if I had told him it was necessary.

I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife (who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)

I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by himself.

We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came, if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a thing of feeble cliches that might have passed in any drawing-room.

We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and that I didn't.

The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from Canterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you come Canterbury at once. Viola."

Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England; the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did not. It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once. Jevons, for Viola's present purposes, was ignored.

With his usual intelligence he saw my point. We made out that the message suggested trouble with Viola's family, and he agreed heartily that he was not precisely the person to deal with that.

Oh yes, he trusted me. He gave me his word of honour that he would stay in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.

Before I left I had a straight talk with him.

I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable than he was to begin with. She might—she probably would in her present mood—insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand, she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at once, while her present mood was on.

He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six months.

I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood (which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour) might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry me. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. I was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if I got the chance. At the present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was just the off-chance in mine.

And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help me (he owned very handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully) why, I'd make it.

Had he anything to say?

He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle, and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk it."

I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses in John's and Margaret's Quad.

I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library. To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me waiting.

I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.

It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury their dead.

The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of girls and of young men at play.

Presently Viola came to me. She held her head if anything higher than usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white, its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears under her eyes.

The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.

She said, "It is good of you to come. Did you mind awfully?"

I said, of course I didn't. She smiled again, the little white, blank smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.

She said, "Everything's happened. It's been awful."

Her smile took on significance—the whole wild irony of disaster. Then she said, "They know."

"All of them? Your brother?"

"No. Not Reggie. He got away in time. They won't tell him. They won't even tell Bertie. They'll never talk about it. But they know."

I said, "Supposing they do know—as long as other people don't—"

"But, Wally, that's just it. Everybody does know."

I couldn't take her quite seriously yet. I asked her: Was it the labels? and she said, No, she'd picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she'd had Heaven's own luck at the station, nobody'd seen her on the up platform, and her people thought she'd come from London. Of course they all asked her where she'd been, and she told them she wasn't going to let on just yet, that it wasn't good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved themselves they'd know some day. She meant to tell them as soon as ever Reggie'd gone. "Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them."

"And do you know," she said, "they thought I was rotting them, that I'd been in some stuffy place in the country all the time."

"Then how on earth," I said, "did they find out?"

"They didn't. They never do find out things. They heard—last night. Somebody saw us."

"Withers?" I said. I'd thought of Withers at once. But he didn't seem likely. He wasn't back yet.

"No. Not Withers. Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger. They were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in the pension. They saw my name in the visitors' book and it excited them. It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished, so that they had to say they knew him. And then of course the other people chipped in and told them all they knew about me. Can't you see them doing it?"

I could indeed.

"I never thought the pension was a good scheme," she said; "but poor Jimmy would make me go to it. He said it was safe. You see how safe it was."

I wasn't quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.

"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"

She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It was you they saw."

I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was glad that Jevons—the ugly element—was disposed of. I was sorry—sorry, indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt—when I thought of the impression Viola's family had of me now; of the terms on which I should be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.

"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"

She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."

"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done. I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them that we met by accident."

"Oh," she said, "I got you out of it all right."

I asked her, "How?"

She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."

"What did you do that for?"

"Because it was Jimmy I went off with. You're all right. They know it's Jimmy."

I groaned. "That's precisely what I've been trying to prevent them knowing."

"They know that, too. I told them that you came out to look for me—like a lamb, to save me—and that you made me come back. They think that was dear of you."

She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.

"You see," she said, "I've saved you."

I could only say, "My dear child—have you saved yourself?"

She was visibly troubled.

"I think—I think they believe me. They say they do. But they don't understand. That's why I sent for you. I want you to make them see."

"Make them see what?" I said. (It was clumsy of me.)

"What it really was," she said.

I asked her if they knew I was there. She said, Yes, they were coming in to see me.

"They want to see you. They want to know."

I saw then what my work was to be. I was not only to witness to her innocence and Jevons's—if they doubted it; I was to show them what she had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it appeared to her. I was to show them Jevons's beauty.

Well, I thought, it'll take some showing.

"Do they," I asked her, "at all realize Jevons?"

"Yes. They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms. Of course I had to say he was. It's almost a pity Reggie met him. That's what's frightened them. You see, he only saw the funny part of him."

(I could imagine what Reggie's description of the funny part of Jevons had been.)

I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.

She said, "Yes. And I've made it worse by telling them I'm going to marry Jimmy."

"And I'm to persuade them that that's the best thing you can do, am I?"

She said, Yes—if I could do that—

I said I couldn't. I couldn't persuade myself. How could I, when I was convinced that the best thing she could do was to marry me?

She said she'd forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of it to her. "It's about Bruges," she said, "that I want you to tell them."

"I can't very well if they don't ask me," I expounded.

"Oh, but," she said, "they will ask you. At least Daddy will."

* * * * *

It was at this point (when, I must say, we had thrashed it out pretty thoroughly) that Mrs. Thesiger came in. Viola left me to her.

I noticed that, except for the moment of Viola's formal introduction of me, neither of them spoke to or looked at the other.

I have said that Mrs. Thesiger was a charming woman. I may have said other things that imply she was not so charming; those things, if I really said them, I take back, now that I have come to my first meeting with her. When I recall that ten minutes—it didn't last longer—I cannot think of her as otherwise than perfect. It took perfection, of a sort, to deal creditably with the situation. Nothing could well have been more painful for Mrs. Thesiger. I, an utter stranger, was supposed to know all about her daughter, to know more than she or any of them knew. I held the secret of those dubious seven days in Belgium. That the days would be dubious I must have known when I set out to bring Viola back from Belgium. I must, the poor lady probably said to herself, have known Viola. And my knowledge of her, so dreadful and so intimate, was a thing she was afraid of; she didn't want to come too near it. But it was also a thing that must be exceedingly painful to me. She conceived that I would dread her approach every bit as much as she dreaded mine.

And so—and so Mrs. Thesiger ignored my knowledge; she ignored the situation. Beautifully and consistently, from the beginning to the end of my stay in Canterbury, she ignored it.

She had come in now to bring me her invitation, and her husband's invitation, to stay. Her husband, she said, expected me. He was out; he had had to go to a Diocesan Meeting—but it would be over by now, the tiresome meeting, and he would be here in a few minutes.

I protested. I had taken rooms at my Fifteenth Century hotel.

She insisted. They could make that all right. They knew the hotel-keeper. He was used to having people taken from him at the last minute. They would send round for my things. My room was waiting for me.

I said, Really?—But they were too kind—

She said, No. It was the least they could do.

This, with its faint suggestion of indebtedness, was as near as she got to the situation.

She must have sighted it in the distance, for she slanted away from it with a perilous and graceful sweep. She had heard so much about me from her daughter. She had wanted to make my acquaintance. She was glad of this opportunity—

(We smiled at each other to show that there was nothing to wince at in her phrase.)

I said I was glad of it too, and what a charming garden they had.

Wasn't it? And did I know Canterbury? I wished I did. Well—I would know it now. And if I didn't mind ringing the bell the butler would fetch my things over from the "Tabard." And so on, charmingly, till the Canon came in and relieved her.

She had done very well.

He, dear, charming man, did the same thing, and did it even better. That's to say, he had a beautiful voice and he was happier in his phrases. He could ignore with the greater ease because he wouldn't have to keep it up so long.

He kept it up till dinner-time. Only now and then his kind, keen look at me told me that he was going to have it out with me, and that he was measuring the man with whom he would have to do.

But before dinner they had taken me to my room. They hoped I wouldn't mind having Bertie's room. The house was full; all the girls were at home, so they had had to give me Bertie's room.

As I dressed in Bertie's room (the drawback of it was that it looked bang out on to the Cathedral Tower and was fairly raked by the chimes), with the Cathedral Tower before my eyes and the Cathedral chimes in my ears, and Canon Thesiger's beautiful voice and Mrs. Thesiger's beautiful face and the beautiful manners of both of them in my memory, it came over me with renewed conviction that Jevons was impossible; that Viola's people knew and felt he was impossible; that Viola knew and felt he was impossible herself; and that in the face of all this impossibility I had a chance. Bruges might back Jevons, but Canterbury would never back him; whereas it was quite evident that Canterbury was backing me.

I was in the drawing-room ten minutes before dinner-time. They were all there: the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and their five unmarried daughters—Victoria, the eldest, Millicent, the High School teacher, Mildred, the nurse, Viola, the youngest but one, and Norah, the youngest.

They were all there, the whole seven of them. And they were all silent until I appeared. As I went down the stairs and through the hall I noticed that the door was open and that no sounds came through it. I caught sight of Viola standing by the window with her back to her family; the others sat or stood in attitudes averted from her and from each other.

When they heard me they all stirred and began talking. And as I came into the room I found the girls drawn together (even Viola had turned from her window).

I see them now: Canon Thesiger standing on the hearthrug, looking handsome; and Mrs. Thesiger beside him, looking handsome, too, in grey silk and a little flushed. I hadn't realized in our first meeting how handsome they both were, and how brilliantly unlike. He was well-built, slender, aquiline, clean-cut and clean-shaven; he had thin, beautiful lips that he held in stiffly; he had dark eyes like his son Reggie's, and dark hair parted correctly in the middle, hair that waved. He had tried to depress and subdue it by hard brushing with a wet brush, but it continued to wave in spite of him, and the crests of the waves were silver, which accentuated them.

Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump. She was fair and blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features, with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness. I say mutinous, because Mrs. Thesiger's way of being handsome was in revolt against her husband's. Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she encouraged its waving. This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger's appearance was frivolous. But it was not. All these florid plumpnesses and the upward curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger's mouth. Their intentions were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize with his. Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity, the superior art of Mrs. Thesiger.

It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.

And she was, if anything, braver than her husband. He could only just smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) I didn't know.

And they—the four daughters—I'm not sure that they weren't the most gallant of this gallant family.

I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents' beauty that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features. Not one of those five little faces was correct. Victoria's had tried hard for correctness in her father's manner, but her mother's irrepressible plumpness had made her miss it, poor girl, just as (I was soon to learn) she had missed everything.

Millicent's face, the face of the one who had been at Girton, hadn't tried for it; it had achieved a plainness I admired because it was oddly like Viola's face, only that Millicent was sallow and thin and dry and wore pince-nez.

Mildred, the nurse, was frankly plump and fair and florid like her mother; her face would have been pretty if her father's nose hadn't stepped in and struggled with her mother's and so spoilt it for her.

Norah, the youngest, was pretty—and odd. She was Viola all over again, but more slender and coloured differently, coloured all wrong. I didn't take to Norah all at once. I wasn't prepared for a Viola with blue eyes and pink cheeks and light hair, and the figure of a young foal. Besides, her hair was outrageous; it waved too much; it was all crinkles, and she hadn't found out yet how to keep it tidy.

She told me afterwards it was "up" that evening for the first time. When it came to her turn, she said: "There are such a dreadful lot of us, aren't there?"

There certainly was. And as I looked at them I thought: Viola has done an irreparable injury to her family, to all these charming people. She has hurt her father and mother in their beauty and their dignity and their honour. As for her sisters, she has ruined what they are much too well-bred to call their "chances." The story of the going off to Belgium with Jevons is spreading through the Close, and through the High School where Millicent teaches, and through the garrison. They will try to hush it up, but they won't be able to; it will reach Chatham and Dover. If they go up to town it will follow them there. Wherever they go it will ultimately follow them. She has struck at the solidarity of the family. To be sure, it was the solidarity of the family that drove her to strike at it. But if you were to tell Canon and Mrs. Thesiger that they had driven her, that they had tied her up too tight, they wouldn't see it. They would say: "We never stopped her going off to London. But that wasn't enough for her. She must go off to Belgium with that man Jevons. She must ruin us."

And Viola knew that she had ruined them.

And there they were, all holding themselves well, and all well dressed—the two youngest in white, the elders in light colours on a scale that deepened to Victoria's old rose. I remember them, even to what they wore and the pathos of their wearing it; they stood out so against the black panelling of the old room. It was full of oak chests and bureaus and Chinese cabinets, and Madonnas in Italian frames, and red and white ivory chessmen, and little bookcases with books in white vellum with scarlet title-pieces, and family portraits, and saints in triptychs on golden backgrounds, and murderous assegais and the skins and horns of animals. And the leaves of the old elms stuffed up the low, mullioned windows looking on the garden.

And somehow you were aware of great streams of empire and of race, streams of august tradition; of sanctity and heroism and honour, and beautiful looks and gentle ways and breeding, all meeting there.

I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought again of Jevons—of Jevons as absolutely impossible. You may say it was pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but there wasn't any other way.

It wasn't their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their behaviour. I don't think I ever met people who knew so well how to behave.

They kept it up. All evening they behaved like people under some heavy calamity which they ignored for the comfort of their guest and for their own dignity. And yet, even if I hadn't known of their calamity, I must have felt it in the air. They knew that I knew it; but that was all the more reason why they should ignore it; they wanted to remove from me the oppression of my knowledge.

During dinner, perhaps, you felt the tension of the catastrophe; any guest who knew as much as I did was bound to be aware of it. It was in little sudden, momentary silences, in the hushed voices and half-scared movements of the butler and the parlourmaid, in the stiffness of the Canon's lip, and in some shade of the elder girls' manner to Viola.

I remember how, in one of those silences, Norah, who sat facing me, leaned forward and addressed me. She said, "Mr. Furnival, you've come from Belgium, haven't you? Do tell me about it! I can't get a word out of Viola."

I supposed they hadn't told Norah. They had spared the youngest. She was only seventeen.

The butler and the parlourmaid, standing rigid by the sideboard, looked at each other in their fright. Mrs. Thesiger saw them and flushed. But Canon Thesiger, who had his back to them, observed that Belgium was a large order, and that Mr. Furnival would have to tell her about it afterwards.

But there was never any afterwards for Norah. She said, "I believe there's a joke about Belgium, and that Mr. Furnival's in it."

Viola laughed. It was, on the whole, the best thing she could do. If I'd giggled, too, it might have helped, but I didn't dare to, sitting there beside Mrs. Thesiger.

The Canon pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss, a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library (he said) for a smoke.

I could see by the fuss he made about his cigarettes that he was nervous, staving off the moment.

It came with the silence of the first cigarette. There were no transitions. He simply settled himself a little deeper into his chair and said, "I'm a little anxious about that girl of mine."

I said, "Are you, sir?" as if I were surprised.

"Well"—he was evidently trying to steer between his decision to ignore and his desire for knowledge—"you see, she's rather reckless and impulsive."

I agreed. She was—a little.

"More than a little, I'm afraid. Do you know anything of this man Jevons she talks about?"

That was masterly of the Canon, the subtle suggestion that Viola did no more than talk about Jevons, the still more subtle implication that if she could talk about him all was well.

I said that Jevons was a very decent fellow, and added that Captain Thesiger had met him.

It was mean of me to shovel the responsibility on to Reggie, but I wanted to gain time, too.

The Canon remembered that Reggie had said something. And then suddenly he discarded subtlety and told me straight out that Reggie had said Jevons was a bit of a bounder, and he supposed he was.

I could see him watching me, trying to break down my defences.

I dodged him with "These things are comparative," and he floored me with a sudden thrust:

"No, my dear boy, they are not."

He meditated. "What sort of age is he?"

I told him, "About thirty-one or two."

"Ah!"

And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals?

I assured him I had never heard a word against them.

He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which I had heard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said they were all right for all I knew.

"Never mind what you know," he answered. "What do you think?"

I said I thought that Jevons had as clean a record as any man I knew.

"You mean," he said, "these things are comparative?"

I said I meant I only wished my morals were as clean. (I went as far as that for Viola—to save her. Besides, there was Jevons to be thought of. I was there to take a fair advantage of him, not an unfair one.)

He took another look at me that seemed to satisfy him, for he said: "Thank you. That's all I want to know."

We smoked in silence. Presently we went into the drawing-room "for a little music." Victoria played. The Canon and Mildred and Norah sang. Millicent went upstairs to prepare a lecture.

When the music was over Viola and Mildred and Norah and I went into the garden, and very soon Mildred and Norah drifted back into the house again and left me with Viola.

She began at once, "Well—did you make him understand?"

I said I hadn't had much opportunity.

Did he ask me about Bruges? No, but he had asked me about Jevons. I told her more or less how I had answered, and she said it was dear of me.

"But it's no use telling them anything about me, Wally."

I asked her, Had they said much?

She said, "No. It's what they think. Or rather, what they don't think. They'll never think the same of me again. And they'll never trust me."

I said, Come, it wasn't so bad as all that.

But she stuck to it.

"There!" she said. "Didn't I tell you?"

Mrs. Thesiger from the drawing-room window was calling to us to come in. The grass was damp.

"They won't trust me even with you."

I thought: "Poor little Viola—she's burned her boats with a vengeance."

Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral chimes. They kept me awake all night.

* * * * *

Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's "lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothing had happened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long. Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence. Appearances were dead against her.

It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful memory?

It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for her, and that I had come to do it.

The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour. He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances, wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving terms his admiration of my moral beauty.

And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without Mrs. Thesiger's.

I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.

I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them—they must have had some idea of what I had come for.

He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.

And then—oh, it was a terrible half-hour!

They had been afraid, and they had talked it over. He didn't tell me all they'd said, but I could imagine most of it: how they had seen that my marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn't know what I was doing, and how they had decided—dear, simple, honourable people—that it would be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to accept so great a sacrifice, even if it was the one way out. I daresay they said to each other that they couldn't put such a burden on an innocent young man; it was their child's doing and they must bear the whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves. They even went further. What Jevons had done to Viola (they'd made up their minds about him) was devil's work. What Viola had done to them was in some way the expression—the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre expression—of God's will. It was the cross they had to bear. God, I suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.

A great deal of this he did say to me. He said it very simply, without phrases.

Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry Viola. But—he didn't think that he could let me do it. If I had only come to him three weeks ago—

He hadn't been able—naturally—to talk about it last night. He had hoped he wouldn't have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.

It couldn't have been worse if I'd seen him about to put a knife into his breast. I tried to stop him, but he would do it, he would put the knife in.

"We don't know," he said, "what may have occurred at Bruges."

"Nothing occurred," I said, "nothing that you need mind."

He said, "That's what the child tells me."

And I, "Surely, sir, you believe her word?"

Of course—of course he believed her word. Viola, he said, might keep the truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it would not be good for them to know it. But she had never told them an untruth. Never. She was—essentially—truthful.

"Only," he said, "we don't know what she may have been driven to. She may have been trying to shield that man Jevons."

I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent. It looked as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola's joining him in Bruges.

But the Canon didn't want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or otherwise. Or what Viola had thought. "It's what they've done," he said. "You can't get over it."

I said what they'd done didn't amount to more than, looking at the Belfry. I could very easily get over that.

He said that I was an Israelite indeed. But the world wasn't all Belfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.

"They travelled together, Furnival. They travelled together."

I said, "Yes. And it wasn't till they'd got to Bruges the second time that Jevons realized that they never ought to. As soon as he did realize it, he cleared out."

He did that too late, the Canon insisted. It was no good my trying to shield Jevons. It wasn't easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had done her was irreparable.

"Not," I said, "if she marries me."

He said, "My dear boy, supposing—supposing it isn't all as innocent as you think? You can't marry her."

I said that made no difference. It was all the more reason.

All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.

That, he said, was what they'd have to go into.

But there I took a high stand. I said it was for me to go into it, and if I didn't, why should they? If I believed in Viola, surely they might? If I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful, wasn't my knowledge good enough for them? I said, "I shall go to her at once and ask her to marry me."

He got up and laid his hand on my arm. "No," he said. "Not at once. Wait. Far better wait."

I asked him, "How long?"

He said, "Till she's had time to get over him."

Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing. "Wait," she said, "at any rate, another week."

She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.

* * * * *

I waited.

I stayed with the Thesigers a week. In fact, I stayed ten days. I got used to the chimes and slept through them. I played chess with Mrs. Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent (Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again (singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me. We all went for picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea and Rye. And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch or dinner or tea in the other Canons' houses, and was introduced to the Dean and the Archbishop. I attended the Cathedral services to an extent that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.

I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance I had ever seen—the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as if nothing had happened.

She said, "Daddy is beautiful, isn't he? He had a sore throat for a fortnight after Aunt Vicky died. And he thinks this is far worse, but he won't go back on me. So he sings."

I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening. I said to her, "Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges. Why can't you see the beauty of all this?"

She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and brilliant), and she answered, "Dear Walter, I've been seeing the beauty of it all my life."

I was seeing it for the first time.

I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere. I sank into it and felt it sinking into me. I was, as Jevons had said I should be, "in it."

And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole. But Canterbury would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.

There's no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten days. I had effaced Jevons's legend. I had even effaced my own legend (for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me). And the Thesigers were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think, considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave slander the most effective answer. People asked each other: Was it likely that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young Furnival had been the man they'd heard about?

At the end of my week the whole seven of them were almost merry. (I may say Norah, the youngest, had been merry all the time.) My visit lapped over into another week.

At the end of ten days my relations with Canon and Mrs. Thesiger became so intimate that we could discuss the situation. They could even smile when I reminded them that there was one good thing about it—Canterbury didn't, and couldn't, realize Jevons.

They hoped devoutly that it never would.

And they thought it wouldn't. By this time, poor darlings, they believed that I had saved them; that Jevons was an illness and that Viola had got over him; that I had cured Viola of Jevons.

I believed it myself. She had avoided me most of the time; she had left me to her sisters, particularly the youngest, Norah. And when I was alone with her she was silent and embarrassed. I thought: "She is beginning to be afraid of me. And that is an excellent sign."

The night before I left Canterbury I asked her, for the third time, to marry me.

She said, "I know why you're asking me, and it's dear of you. But it's no good. It can't be done. Not even that way."



V

The next day I went back to Bruges to release Jevons from his parole.

I found him sitting tight in his hotel in the Market-Place, waiting my return with composure.

He had recovered in my absence and had been making the best of his internment. He had written a series of articles on "The Old Cities of Flanders." He worked them up afterwards into that little masterpiece of his, "My Flemish Journal," which gave him his European celebrity (it must have made delightful reading for the Thesigers). There was no delay, no reverse, no calamity that Jevons couldn't turn into use and profit as it came. Yes, I know, and into charm and beauty. Viola Thesiger lives in his "Flemish Journal" with an enduring beauty and charm.

I said I was sorry for keeping him shut up in Bruges so long. He said it didn't matter a bit. He had been very busy.

I thought it was his articles and his book (he had been dreaming of it) that had made Jevons so happy. But I was mistaken.

We spent half the night in talking, sitting up in my big room on the first floor for the sake of space and air.

Jevons went straight to the point by asking me how I had got on at Canterbury.

I felt that I owed him a perfect frankness in return for the liberties I had taken with him, so I told him how I had got on.

He said, "I'm not going to pretend to be astonished. But you can't say I didn't play fair. I gave you your innings, didn't I?"

I said I'd had them, anyhow. We'd leave it at that.

He said, No. We couldn't leave it at that. He'd given me my innings. He could have stopped my having them any minute, but he'd made up his mind I should have them. So that nobody should say afterwards he hadn't played fair.

I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night. I am putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his. Think of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible ten days.

Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.

"You see," he went on, "I knew you'd got one chance, and I meant you to have it. I meant you to make the most of it. There are things, Furnival, I haven't got the hang of—yet—little, little things like breeding and good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free hand.

"Well, I gave you a free hand.

"You needn't thank me. I wasn't thinking of you so much. I was thinking of Viola. I wanted to be perfectly fair to her. If there was a chance of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I wanted her to have her chance. I wanted, you see, to be rather more than fair. If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over, not just to sneak in on a doubtful point. I wanted Viola to know what she was doing. I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she married me—to go home and see it all over again in case she had forgotten.

"And of course I was thinking of myself too. I'm an egoist. For my own sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn't any sort of hankering after you."

I said if it was any comfort to him he could be. Viola hadn't any hankering after me at all. This—if he cared to know it—was the third time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.

He said he did care to know it, very much. It was most important.

"I," he said, "have never proposed to her at all.

"That," he went on, "is just the one risk I wouldn't take.

"And there," he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up out of sheer cussedness.

"So I never let her start. Women," he generalized, "admire success. If I were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival—and I will if you like—you couldn't make anything of them with those three howlers to your account. There isn't any record of failure against me. Good God! D'you suppose I'd be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same woman? Not me!"

I said he needn't rub it in.

He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn't go and do the same thing next time.

"Because—now we're coming to the point—there will be a next time for you, Furnival. That's why I don't even pretend to be sorry for you. There'll be other women. But there aren't any next times for me, and there aren't any other women. This—I mean she—was my one chance. It was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself. It was infernal—when you think what I stood to lose."

I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to lose more than I did.

He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism. It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.

Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could never give her what she wanted. And he could.

He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the reasons for my failure.

"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing she wants and always will want.

"But let that pass.

"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to find out something about her. But you didn't try. With all your opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do—how she'll behave if you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about anything but her—I've been studying her straight on end for ten months and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.

"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I took trouble."

I suggested that I'd taken trouble enough in all conscience. He laughed.

"You only took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Would you have ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her up and protecting her for your own wretched sake—which was the last thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."

I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to compromise her in order to marry her—even if I did find I couldn't marry her in any other way.

I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't look at him—I didn't want to look at him—but I could feel him there, breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.

Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot as to think of it before everything else."

"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards—when you'd got what you wanted. When you had compromised her."

"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival, you lie."

I said I only meant that she was compromised. At any rate, that was what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.

"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to me than it can to any of you people."

I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.

He laughed out at that.

"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves—of their precious respectability. I've suffered thinking of her.

"Suffer? I've been through all that. It wasn't right, Furnival, it wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."

I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound to appear to other people.

"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"

I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."

He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that, certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps make a clean breast of it while he was about it.

Well—he made his clean breast.

He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond what I knew. But—there was a point, he said, when everything might have. When he had meant that it should happen.

He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing—nothing beyond looking at the Belfry. He had thought—as she did—that it would be quite possible to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took her to Ghent.

Because he did take her there. He meant—then—exactly what Viola's father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if they took a woman to Ghent.

"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But—here's where you went wrong—I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying me—tying herself up to me for ever—was a risk I ought not to let her take. I thought—I thought I could make her happy without all that awful risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we had taken we had a right to happiness. Certainly she had. And I thought she thought the same.

"So I took her to Ghent.

"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.

"I ought to tell you that we did have rooms in the same hotel in Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered—nobody that either of us knew.

"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't—I don't know how it was—but it came over me that I couldn't—I hadn't the courage. I think I found out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel you were in in the Place d'Armes. We were sitting together in the lounge—you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass partition in it along the staircase—you can see people through it going up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said good night. And there was a look in her eyes—Fright, a sort of fright.

"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the lounge, to make sure I was still there.

"She looked so helpless somehow—and so pretty—that for the life of me I couldn't.

"No.

"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the pension with those women."

I thought of the irony of it.

If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and put her in the pension with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury being a bit the wiser.

But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.

We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.

Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.

After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made sub-editor of Sport, and thus acquired a settled income. And one morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany:

"MY DEAR WALTER:

"I married Jimmy five days ago. Nobody but Norah knew anything about it till it was all over. But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England. I'm afraid he's had a sore throat ever since. I wish you'd go down to Canterbury and tell them that it's all right and that I'm ever so happy. There really isn't any reason why Daddy shouldn't sing.

"As Norah says: 'It's his not singing that gives the show away.' Yours ever,

"V. J."



BOOK II

HER BOOK



VI

I did not go down to Canterbury all at once. I was vowed, of course, to Mrs. Jevons's everlasting service (I think I've succeeded in making that clear), but I could not—under the whacking blow of her marriage I could not do as she asked me then and there. The reminiscences of Canterbury were poignant. I had to have a little time to recover in. And in those first terrible weeks I didn't see why Jevons should have all the amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering. I knew that Jevons had suffered, too—quite horribly—but his anguish, after all, was a thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and the future. I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola's view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever. There was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put on him.

So I waited. I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor of Sport could spare to his subordinate). Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.

They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a labourer's. It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in front with a green paling round it.

A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden. Some of it wouldn't go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.

Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.

He called to her, "Have you measured?" And she answered, "Yes. He says it can't be done. Oh, there's Furny!"

Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than to me. Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly her slave.

The carpenter was saying: "That there room is out by a good four inches—by a good four inches 'tis. An' the way you've got to look at it is this, m'm. Not as this 'ere tester is too 'igh fer that ceilin', but how as that there ceilin' is too low fer this tester."

"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the ceiling four inches."

"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons). "You 'ave not. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead, and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."

"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."

"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you never know where you are."

"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"

"No, sir. They have not."

Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.

"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."

"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully happy with him."

He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau, above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be like—to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz rosebuds squinting down at you.

"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour—"

The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a child.

"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' then you'll 'ave to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"

Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or frighten them; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.

"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at it. And the carpenter came up and looked at us. And the foreman and the other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and they looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.

Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the kitchen when they weren't there.

They showed me the little bits of furniture they'd got. Jevons had a passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of drawers with brass handles. She pointed out the brass handles.

I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me all these things because there wasn't and there hadn't been, and perhaps there never would be anybody else to tell them to. I thought of the mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who were married, who had been married so differently. There was something queer, something wrong about it all. I believe the very workmen felt that it was so and were sorry for her.

When they had all gone away at six o'clock Jevons and I took our coats off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted all the linen and the blankets. And at nine o'clock we dined on bacon that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom, wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his mother's sister who had brought him up. He said that jug was all that Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.