And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement—­and his defiance and exaltation, if you like—­that I felt, I do not mean that Jevons talked about it.  He was, for those three days, mostly silent.  It is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly counted.

And every minute we expected to hear him say that he liked the War because it made him feel manly.  Norah and I pretended to each other that he would say it—­it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.

It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began trying to enlist.  It was the first thing he did; and we thought that funny.

We thought it so funny that even if he hadn’t told us not to tell Viola we wouldn’t have told her; we felt that it wouldn’t have been quite fair to either of them.

And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could take Jimmy seriously for one moment.  With General Thesiger waiting to be sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on to get their commissions, they hadn’t time for Jimmy and his importunity.  He was importunate; and I’m afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn’t exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours now and then.  They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn’t even think of the fate of Europe.

And Viola—­what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew.  She didn’t tell us.  But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for the front in two weeks it wasn’t Jevons she was thinking of.  I suspected that she wasn’t far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie.  Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year, when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers.  She had never lowered her flag or made one sign.  She had just suffered in secret with the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till, wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound.  And she had been ill of her wounds and had nearly died of them.

And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be ill again.  It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive what it must have been for her!

And so we came to Reggie’s last day and the night when he came to us to say good-bye.

I think she must have written to him or made some sign.  But I’m not sure.  I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah’s arms, he closed on her, and that they held each other an instant—­tight, like lovers—­and that neither of them said a word.