“MY DEAR WALTER: 

“I married Jimmy five days ago.  Nobody but Norah knew anything about it till it was all over.  But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England.  I’m afraid he’s had a sore throat ever since.  I wish you’d go down to Canterbury and tell them that it’s all right and that I’m ever so happy.  There really isn’t any reason why Daddy shouldn’t sing.

“As Norah says:  ‘It’s his not singing that gives the show away.’  Yours ever,

“V.  J.”

BOOK II

HER BOOK

VI

I did not go down to Canterbury all at once.  I was vowed, of course, to Mrs. Jevons’s everlasting service (I think I’ve succeeded in making that clear), but I could not—­under the whacking blow of her marriage I could not do as she asked me then and there.  The reminiscences of Canterbury were poignant.  I had to have a little time to recover in.  And in those first terrible weeks I didn’t see why Jevons should have all the amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering.  I knew that Jevons had suffered, too—­quite horribly—­but his anguish, after all, was a thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and the future.  I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola’s view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever.  There was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put on him.

So I waited.  I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor of Sport could spare to his subordinate).  Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.

They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a labourer’s.  It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in front with a green paling round it.

A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden.  Some of it wouldn’t go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.

Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.

He called to her, “Have you measured?” And she answered, “Yes.  He says it can’t be done.  Oh, there’s Furny!”

Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than to me.  Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly her slave.

The carpenter was saying:  “That there room is out by a good four inches—­by a good four inches ‘tis.  An’ the way you’ve got to look at it is this, m’m.  Not as this ’ere tester is too ‘igh fer that ceilin’, but how as that there ceilin’ is too low fer this tester.”