We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend after seeing her off.  I can’t recall much of what we did talk about, but I remember that Jevons’s remarks were always interesting, and that in his lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing.  In one respect only he had deteriorated.  Jevons’s strong language was no longer strong.  It came, if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings.  It was a thing of feeble cliches that might have passed in any drawing-room.

We didn’t, then, talk about Viola.  But I know that he heard from her and that I didn’t.

The first week of Jevons’s fortnight was up when I got a wire from Canterbury.  It said:  “Reggie sailed yesterday.  Trouble.  Can you come Canterbury at once.  Viola.”

Of course the word that stuck out of it was “Trouble.”  For the rest it was ambiguous.  I couldn’t tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble was connected somehow with Reggie’s sailing, or whether in announcing his departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England; the coast was clear.  Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did not.  It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once.  Jevons, for Viola’s present purposes, was ignored.

With his usual intelligence he saw my point.  We made out that the message suggested trouble with Viola’s family, and he agreed heartily that he was not precisely the person to deal with that.

Oh yes, he trusted me.  He gave me his word of honour that he would stay in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.

Before I left I had a straight talk with him.

I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very seriously.  But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him.  He must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable than he was to begin with.  She might—­she probably would in her present mood—­insist on marrying him without their consent.  On the other hand, she just mightn’t.  And it wasn’t as if he could afford to marry her at once, while her present mood was on.

He said, No.  But in six months he could afford it.  He gave himself six months.

I said, Anything might happen in six months.  Miss Thesiger’s present mood (which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour) might change.  And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry me.  He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. I was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if I got the chance.  At the present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour.  But there was just the off-chance in mine.