Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola’s illness.

It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her from her bed.  And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat up with her at night.  If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open.  And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands and quiet.  He didn’t even breathe hard.  And when she was convalescent and a little fretful and troublesome there wasn’t anybody else who could manage her.  The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her medicine and lift her.  She couldn’t bear anybody else to touch her.

I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried.  I remember her saying, “Jimmy, if you’ll only put your hands on my forehead and keep them there.”

I think he must have sat for hours with his hands on her forehead.

I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against his will.  It was always for a walk in the Park—­the same walk, through Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he could time it to a minute.  He wouldn’t look at his motor-car.  I think he hated it.  Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go out in it again.

She wasn’t well enough till April.  She never would have been well enough, she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses said, if it hadn’t been for Jimmy.  He swore that they were fools when they gave her up and said she couldn’t live.  He said he’d make her live.  And I believe he made her.

He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get well.  And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he said he’d take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back in June, still slender but recovered.

That illness of hers saved them for the time.  It reinstated him.  It improved him.  He couldn’t, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same time.  All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him.  He came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence.  Even Reggie couldn’t have found a flaw in him.

That had always been Jevons’s way.  Just when you had made up your mind that you couldn’t bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that it made your heart ache.  From the very fact that he was intolerable to-day you might be sure he’d be adorable to-morrow.

And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we thought, Really, it will be all right now.  Viola’s passion for him had been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.