I don’t know whether my face expressed horror or admiration.  It must have been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.

“Why not?  Why should poor little Jimmy go?”

“Because he wants to.  You’d no business to stop him when he wanted to go.”

“But—­that was it.  He didn’t want to go.  He only thought he ought to go.”

“How,” I said sternly, “do you know what he wanted?”

“Because,” she said, “he told Uncle Billy.  He kept on saying he ought to go.  And we told him he oughtn’t.  What earthly good can Jimmy do out there, with his poor little heart all dicky?  He’ll simply die of it.  You don’t suppose I’d have stopped him if I’d thought it was good for him to go?  Or if I’d thought he really wanted to?  We told him all that—­Uncle Billy and I did—­we told him straight that if he tried to get out we’d try and stop him.”

“Oh,” I said, “you told him.  That’s a different thing.”

“Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them.  At least they’re never half so nasty.  Of course we told him.  And of course he laughed in our faces.  We thought we had stopped him.  But—­he’s slipped through our fingers.

“We might,” she said, “have known.”

I heard her say all that, though I wasn’t listening.  It comes back to me that she said it.  It was dawning on me that in this queer business there were details, quite important details, that had escaped me.  The war had taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola’s affairs.  But it was evident that things had happened while I was away.  I was thinking of something that she let out.

“Look here,” I said, “when you say you told him, do you mean that you and he have been seeing each other?”

“Of course we’ve been seeing each other.  Until he stopped it.  He said he couldn’t stand the strain.”

“And you?” I said.  “Did you stand it?”

She looked at me straight and hard.

“You’ve no right to ask me that,” she said.

* * * * *

Well, perhaps I hadn’t.  And if I had owned frankly that I hadn’t all might have been well.  But, as it was, before I knew where we both were, we had quarrelled.

Yes.  I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really doesn’t matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must have been living in.

When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I answered that I thought I had.

She said, “What right?”

And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.

And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful.  We two were up there alone and she had me at her mercy.  She held me in the blaze.

“I suppose,” she said, “I’m to think of your everlasting meddling with my affairs?”

I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her husband’s.