And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of.  I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t.  I wasn’t taking any unfair advantage of him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the Flemish atmosphere to help him.  If I could make any running in Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help me (he owned very handsomely that it would help me, that I’d be “in it” quite beautifully) why, I’d make it.

Had he anything to say?

He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle, and he said, “All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance.  I’ll risk it.”

I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers’ house in the Close.  I spotted it at once.  It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses in John’s and Margaret’s Quad.

I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon’s library.  To my great relief the Canon wasn’t in his library.  It looked out on to a perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it.  I said to myself, “If I want atmosphere I’ve got it.  Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers’ garden in Canterbury Close.”  I’d time to take it all in, for Viola kept me waiting.

I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I’d taken in more atmosphere than I wanted already as I came through the house.  You went upstairs to the Canon’s library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor.  And in passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere.  It wasn’t simply the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close.  It was something in the house.  I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall.  It was the sum of slight but definite impressions:  the sudden silence of voices that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.

It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement.  I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury their dead.

The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers’ house.  From the tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of girls and of young men at play.

Presently Viola came to me.  She held her head if anything higher than usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble in the air.  But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white, its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears under her eyes.

The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.

She said, “It is good of you to come.  Did you mind awfully?”

I said, of course I didn’t.  She smiled again, the little white, blank smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.