He got up and laid his hand on my arm.  “No,” he said.  “Not at once.  Wait. 
Far better wait.”

I asked him, “How long?”

He said, “Till she’s had time to get over him.”

Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing. 
“Wait,” she said, “at any rate, another week.”

She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.

* * * * *

I waited.

I stayed with the Thesigers a week.  In fact, I stayed ten days.  I got used to the chimes and slept through them.  I played chess with Mrs. Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent (Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again (singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me.  We all went for picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea and Rye.  And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch or dinner or tea in the other Canons’ houses, and was introduced to the Dean and the Archbishop.  I attended the Cathedral services to an extent that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.

I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance I had ever seen—­the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as if nothing had happened.

She said, “Daddy is beautiful, isn’t he?  He had a sore throat for a fortnight after Aunt Vicky died.  And he thinks this is far worse, but he won’t go back on me.  So he sings.”

I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening.  I said to her, “Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges.  Why can’t you see the beauty of all this?”

She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and brilliant), and she answered, “Dear Walter, I’ve been seeing the beauty of it all my life.”

I was seeing it for the first time.

I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere.  I sank into it and felt it sinking into me.  I was, as Jevons had said I should be, “in it.”

And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole.  But Canterbury would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.

There’s no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten days.  I had effaced Jevons’s legend.  I had even effaced my own legend (for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me).  And the Thesigers were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think, considerable success.  By having me there, by being charming to me, by presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave slander the most effective answer.  People asked each other:  Was it likely that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young Furnival had been the man they’d heard about?