She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she’d worked it, down to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I’d had any difficulty with my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I haven’t to this day found out.  Sometimes I think she’d worked that too; she knew the firm, and she wasn’t Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)—­if I’d had any difficulty she could put that straight for me.  She’d got her car—­Jimmy’d ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it—­and her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.

It was a better car than the one I’d had in Belgium before or, she said significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me.  It was true that I didn’t know anything about cars.

Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and said, Couldn’t I see it wasn’t any use trying to stop her?  She had me at every point.  If I wouldn’t take her she’d go by herself with the chauffeur.

And when I said, How about my promises—­my word of honour?  Viola laughed.

“Your honour’s all right, Wally,” she said.  “You’re not taking me out; I’m taking you.”

And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the midday boat for Ostend.  And Norah came with us to see us off.  If I’d given her the smallest encouragement she’d have come too.  I might take her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.

I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women.  I’d take my sister-in-law there, but not my wife.

I suppose the dressing-down I’d got from Viola two nights before had rankled.  I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when I threw it up to her that she wasn’t my wife.

Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn’t wanted.

But Viola only laughed again and said, “Please remember that I’m taking you, not you me.  And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn’t altogether on your account.  You needn’t think it.  As for keeping her back, you couldn’t do it if she meant to go.  It’s Baby that’s keeping her, not you.”

And then she thanked God she hadn’t got a child.

And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in earnest—­for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of us—­we got off.  I remember at the last moment Norah—­dear little Norah—­telling her that she was not to bully me.  She was to let me sit in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn’t get into any danger.

Danger?  Danger?  As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger in itself.