I said a little irritably that I had no reason to suppose anything of the sort.

“They would,” she said.  “Why, bless you, that’s what they asked you down at Whitsuntide for!  I don’t mean that they said to each other:  Let’s ask him down and then he’ll marry Viola.  They wouldn’t even think it—­they’re much too nice.  Poor dears—­they’d be horrified if they knew I knew it!  But it was underneath their minds, you know, pushing them on all the time.  I believe they sent Reggie up to have a look at you, though they don’t know that either.  They think they sent him to see what I was up to.  You see, Furny dear, from their point of view you are so eligible.  And really, do you know, I think that’s what’s dished you—­what’s dished us both, if you like to put it that way.  I’m sure you may.”

I said it didn’t matter much what dished me or how I put it, provided I was dished.  But—­was I?

Oh yes!  She left me in no doubt that I was dished.  And I saw—­I still see, and if anything more clearly—­why.

I was everything that Canterbury approved of.  And Viola, in her young revolt, was up against everything of which Canterbury approved.  Her people were dear people; they were charming people, well-bred people; they had unbroken traditions of beautiful behaviour.  And they had tied her up too tight in their traditions; that was all.  Viola would never marry anybody on whom Canterbury had set its seal.

And seeing all that, I saw that I had missed her by a mere accident.  It was my friend the General who had dished me when he testified to my entire eligibility.  That’s to say, it was my own fault.  If I had let well alone; if I hadn’t turned the General on to them, I should have been in the highest degree ineligible; I should have been a person of whom Canterbury most severely disapproved; when I’ve no doubt that Viola, out of sheer perversity, would have insisted on marrying me.

She said as much.  So far she saw into herself and no farther.

The Northern Heights were favourable to this interview, for the taxi broke down in an attempt to scale East Heath Road, so that we walked the last few hundred yards together to her door.

It was while we were walking that—­stung by a sudden fear, a reminiscence of the afternoon—­I asked her:  Was there anybody else?

No, she said, there wasn’t.  How could there be?  Hadn’t she told me she liked me better than anybody else, next to Reggie?

“Are you sure?” I said.  “Are you quite sure?”

She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me.

“Of course,” she said.  “There isn’t anybody.  Except poor, funny little Jevons.  And you couldn’t mean him.”

That was as near as we got to him then.

But a week later—­the week before Easter—­he came to us suddenly in my rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.

He had come to tell us of his good luck.  His novel had been accepted.