Yes.  I remembered.  It came back to me, that startling indiscretion at the dinner-table which was, after all, so deliciously discreet.  Knowing Norah as I know her now, I wouldn’t mind betting that Jevons owes his position, in Canterbury (and he has one) to-day far more to his youngest sister-in-law’s manoeuvres with the Dean and Chapter than to my handling of his case—­No; I’m forgetting what he does owe that to.  Let’s say, then, his position in Canterbury yesterday—­a year ago.

Well, I had an hour’s talk with the Canon.

There was some awkwardness in having to point out to a man of his beauty and dignity that his duty lay in any other direction than the one he was so plainly heading for.  I put it on the grounds of pity.  I pleaded for Viola, I said she was unhappy.

He replied that that was not the account she had given of herself.

I said, Perhaps not.  But if she wasn’t unhappy now she very soon would be if he persisted in refusing to acknowledge them.

But his lip went stiffer and stiffer.  He was too unhappy himself to be got at that way.  So I took him on the ground of expediency.  I said after all Jevons was his son-in-law.  He couldn’t go on ignoring Jevons.  I used Viola’s argument.  He wasn’t dealing with an ordinary man.  In a few years’ time Tasker Jevons would be so celebrated that it would be absurd to pretend to ignore him.

The Canon stuck to it that he didn’t care how celebrated the fellow was.

I said, “You can’t keep it up for ever.  You’ll have to recognize him in the end.  You don’t want to cut the poor chap while he’s struggling and accept him when he rolls, as he probably will roll.”

The Canon said he wasn’t going to accept him at all.  He said that Jevons rolling would he if anything more odious than Jevons as he was.  He couldn’t forget what had happened.  And that was the end of it.

I told him that it hadn’t happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the way to make everybody think it had.  And whether it had happened or not, he must surely want other people to forget it.  And once start the abominable impression, Jevons’s celebrity would cause it to be remembered for ever, or at any rate for this generation.  Whereas he could put a stop to the whole thing at once by behaving as if nothing had happened.  He had only got to ask them down next week.

“Does he want to be asked down?”

I said, No, he didn’t.  I told him what Jevons had said—­that he didn’t care whether he was recognized or not, but that he “couldn’t stand the slur that was being put upon his wife.”

I saw him wince at that.

“That’s how it strikes him?” he said.

I answered that that was how it would strike most people.

“I’m putting the slur on my daughter, am I?”

I was pitiless.  I said, Certainly he was.  If he persisted.

Then, after telling me that I had hit him hard, he fell back on another line of defence.  He owed it to his priesthood not to condone his daughter’s conduct.