open-work to Adams cabinets and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and eighteenth-century gilded bergere chairs to old oak and Chippendale.  Cloisonne and Sevres stood side by side on the same shelf.  He had an Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at intervals down the sides.  Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end.  It was a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide archway between.  And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.

“And the awfullest thing of all is,” Norah was saying, “that he’s done it to please her.”

“Don’t believe her.  That’s the beautiful part of it.”

Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.

Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not caring.

We couldn’t say anything—­we were too miserable.  She looked round the dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in her remoteness.  She smiled faintly.

“What does it matter,” she said, “so long as it makes him happy?  It would be sweet if you’d come down and help us now.”

We went down, and the house-warming began.

It was Jimmy who told us what our business was.  We were to stand by visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed it) of the Tudor hall.  If we couldn’t break it we must do what we could to help recovery.  He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup administered during the first paroxysm.

We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity—­their emotions were facile and champagne intensified them.  They would ask where the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his suit of armour, and what did we think he’d done with the family portraits?

But the Thesigers (all except Charlie—­and Charlie, Norah said, had no heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners.  I shall never forget the General’s face as the suits of armour struck him—­his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it.  And the Canon—­

The Canon rose to even greater heights.  We were a bit afraid that he would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy’s furnishings.  But no.  He behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings, as though Jimmy’s Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his natural background.