“You see, Furny,” she said, “nobody’s going to stop me.  Nobody wants to stop me.”

At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.

We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder in the street at the back of it was Viola’s pension, and here on our right hand was Jimmy’s hotel, and there, towering before us, was the Belfry.  We looked at each other.  And through the war and across nine years, it all came back to us.

“The Belfry’s still there,” I said.

“It always was.”  She said it a little sternly.  But she had smiled at the allusion, all the same—­the smile that had never been denied to it.

We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy’s hotel.  The fat proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us.  They remembered Jimmy.  And they had seen him three days ago.  Mr. Chevons had passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car.  They seemed uncertain whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her indifferently as either.  An awful indifference had come to them.  Of the war they said, "C’est triste, nest-ce pas?" We left them, sitting pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after us with the saddest of smiles.

That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy’s hotel.  It was too much for Viola.  It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her.  I don’t know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had been killed.  The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up.  By the time the waiter brought the coffee she was done for.  Her eyes stared, hard and hot, over the cup she tried to drink from.  She couldn’t drink because of the spasm in her throat.

“Come,” I said, “we must clear out of this.”

We cleared out.

I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking into the Canal.  It was the sentry’s sudden springing up to challenge us that saved me.  I hoped that it would save Viola.  She enjoyed the sentries.

But not this time.  Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some irritation at the delay.  I felt then that I had to take her in hand.

“My dear child,” I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now), “do you realize that there’s a war?”

She answered, “Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is.”

“Do you know that Antwerp’s over there, a little way to the north?  And that they’ve dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of Antwerp?”

“Oh, Wally—­have they?”