It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn’t to, so long as people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more awful if she didn’t marry him at all.  And supposing she married him.  They might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful memory?

It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for her, and that I had come to do it.

The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour.  He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity.  I didn’t anticipate the smallest difficulty with him or with any of Viola’s family.  They seemed to be looking to me pathetically to save them.  I had every reason to know that my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances, wasn’t anywhere.  In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it raised me several points in the Canon’s estimation.  He had seen what I had been driving at.  The cleaner I made out Jevons’s record to be, the better I succeeded in shielding Viola.  He expressed in the most moving terms his admiration of my moral beauty.

And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that dished me with the Canon.  I had reckoned, you see, without his, without Mrs. Thesiger’s.

I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I meant to ask Viola to marry me.  His lip stiffened.

I said I hoped it wouldn’t be a violent shock to them—­they must have had some idea of what I had come for.

He said, Yes.  They had been afraid I had come for that.

And then—­oh, it was a terrible half-hour!

They had been afraid, and they had talked it over.  He didn’t tell me all they’d said, but I could imagine most of it:  how they had seen that my marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn’t know what I was doing, and how they had decided—­dear, simple, honourable people—­that it would be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to accept so great a sacrifice, even if it was the one way out.  I daresay they said to each other that they couldn’t put such a burden on an innocent young man; it was their child’s doing and they must bear the whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves.  They even went further.  What Jevons had done to Viola (they’d made up their minds about him) was devil’s work.  What Viola had done to them was in some way the expression—­the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre expression—­of God’s will.  It was the cross they had to bear.  God, I suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.