In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding.  We had no sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of Flanders.  She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind.  She seemed to be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if I would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion in my travels.  We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her freshness declared how admirably she had forgotten.  It wasn’t as if we didn’t know what we were really out for.

Except that she was a maturer person—­thirty-one and not twenty-two—­I might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in Belgium, and taking the war, since there was a war on, in her stride.

And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same time playing precisely Jevons’s part in the adventure.  She too must have been aware of this oddness—­for she stopped suddenly to say to me, “Do you remember when I ran away with Jimmy?  Isn’t it funny that I should be running away with you?”

I said it was.  Very funny indeed.  And I wondered why she had drawn my attention to it just now?  Did she want to make me judge by the transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent innocence of that?  I think so.  Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger’s apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the trouble of the last five years.  It accounted for her attack on me the other night.  It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, “Now, perhaps, when I’m running away with your precious perfection, at last you understand?”

We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane the night before.  She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty.  “And so,” she said, “there won’t be anybody to see us.”

It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a thread my reputation hung.

The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning.  I had made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola’s military pass, I was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies.  In fact, there was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola’s protection.