I found the family diminished.  Mildred had gone to a case; Millicent was away for her Midsummer holiday; only Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and Norah and Victoria were left.  They had the air of survivors of an appalling disaster.  The Canon and Mrs. Thesiger were aged by about ten years; poor Victoria looked tired and haggard; even Norah was depressed.  You felt that the trouble in the house was irreparable this time.  They had held their heads up against the scandal that was supposed to have occurred in Belgium; they couldn’t realize it; it was the sort of thing that occurred to other people, not to them.  And, after all, they didn’t know that it had occurred.  But the scandal of a mesalliance which really had occurred in England three weeks ago was well within their range, and it had crushed them.  It wasn’t, as Jevons cynically maintained, that they objected to a mesalliance—­any mesalliance—­more than to the other thing; I think they had never really believed in the other thing, and this marriage, so far from effacing it, had rubbed it in, had made it appear publicly as if, after all, it might have been so.  It was not only excessively disagreeable to them in itself, but it left them in that ghastly doubt.

And this time they couldn’t look to me to save them.

Still it was evident that they looked to me for something.  I was tackled by each one of them in turn.  The Canon wanted to know if I had anything to tell him.  Mrs. Thesiger wondered whether Viola would have enough to live on.  Victoria, in the absence of her parents, took me into a corner to inquire under her breath, “Is he really very awful?” Norah—­she had known all about it; they hadn’t spared her, they hadn’t kept it from her; you couldn’t keep anything from Norah; she had got it all out of Viola the day before I came down the first time—­Norah told me I’d have to make her father ask them down.  She took Jevons’s view that it was the Canon who was causing all the scandal now (only she called it fuss).  There never would have been any if Mummy and Daddy had had the sense to take it properly and treat it as a joke.  Nobody who knew Viola could take it as anything else.

“But,” she said, “if Daddy goes about pulling a long face and keeping up his sore throat over it, everybody’ll think there must be something in it.  I could have got it all right for them in a jiffy if they’d left it to me.”

“What would you have done, then?” I was really anxious to know.

“Oh, I’d have run round telling everybody about it—­as a joke.  A thundering good joke.  If they’d turned me on to it in time I could have easily overtaken those shocking old cats who got in first.  As it is,” she said, “I’ve stopped a lot of it—­though Daddy doesn’t know it—­just that way.  You should have seen me with the Colonel and the Dean!  But if somebody doesn’t stop Daddy he’ll go and mess it all up again.  Don’t you remember how he dished my game at dinner the first night you were here?”