It was softer, though.  It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing about me and my screen.

“What harm did I ever do you?  Or poor Jimmy either?  I didn’t let you marry me.  You ought to be grateful to Jimmy.  At least he saved you from that.”

I said I thought we needn’t drag her husband into it, and I haven’t a notion what I meant.  I had to say something, and if it sounded disagreeable, so much the better.

And she said there I was again—­thinking that I had to remind her that Jimmy was her husband.

“You certainly seem to have forgotten it,” I said.

“He knows how much I’ve forgotten.”

With that last word she left me.

I tried hard to shake the horror of it off.  I remember I sat down to my proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them.  But all the time I heard Viola’s voice saying, “I can understand your wanting me to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you....  But why on earth you should keep it up like this!  What can it matter to you now whether I’m nice or horrid?”

It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning.  I had only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.

* * * * *

And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.

She had let the subject drop abruptly.  She didn’t even refer to it when my friend the editor of the Morning Standard rang me up the next day to ask me if I’d go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.

He was charmingly frank about it.  He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn’t get him (and his powerful pen) why then, he’d had to fall back on me.  Jevons, he said, had let him down pretty badly; he’d understood from Jevons that he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours’ notice.  And he’d given him twenty-four hours; and he’d found that he’d gone out there two days ago.  Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper.  Could I, at twenty-three hours’ notice, take his place?

I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.

And then I went to see about my motor-car.

It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight began.

First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car?  I told her she needn’t worry herself about my motor-car.  It wasn’t any concern of hers.  She grinned at that and said, All right.  What she really wanted was to consult me about her passport.

And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a Red Cross brassard on her right arm.