I sent her a look that was meant to say, “You ought to know better;” but it missed fire somehow.  She went on swinging her feet and laughing softly at me over Jimmy’s shoulder.  She seemed, like Jimmy, to be contemplating some exquisite knowledge that she had.  And at last she said: 

“Aren’t you glad now that you didn’t marry me?”

I said, “What am I to say to that?”

Jimmy got up and clapped me on the shoulder.  “Never mind her,” he said. 
“Tell the truth and shame the devil.  Tell her you’re thundering glad.”

At that she slid down from her perch and came round to me and patted me very gently on the head.

“I am, Wally.  Jimmy, you’re a beast.”

And she went out of the room.  Jimmy said that nothing she had contributed to the discussion became her like her leaving it.

She had left it to him.

He got into his chair again and sat down to it.

“Now, perhaps,” he said, “you see how right I was.”

“When?”

“The first time we ever spoke about it.”

“My dear Jimmy, I haven’t spoken to anybody about it till to-night.”

“We spoke about it years ago,” he said.

“We couldn’t possibly have spoken about it years ago.”

“At Bruges.  Perhaps it was I who spoke.  I tell you I saw it coming.  Don’t you remember I gave you six months?”

“You were out there, anyhow.  It’s taken three and a half years.”

“Because you were such a duffer.  You behaved as if you expected the poor child to propose to you herself.  I’ve been trying to make you see it for the last three and a half years, and you wouldn’t.  There never was such a chap for not seeing what’s under his nose.”

“Norah isn’t under my nose; she’s miles above it, and if it comes to that, I’ve seen it for the last three years.”

He had tripped me up by the heels.

“There you are—­that brings it to the six months I gave you.”

“I didn’t mean I was thinking of it then.  How could I be?”

“Of course you weren’t thinking of it.  But she was.”

“Norah?  Not she!  A child of seventeen!”

“I don’t mean Norah.  I mean Viola.”

“Viola?”

“Yes.  You didn’t see what the unscrupulous minx was after.  She was plotting it and planning it the first time you were at Canterbury.  I got a letter from her at Bruges—­I can’t show it you—­telling me not to worry about you—­I was worrying about you, though you were such a damn fool, if you don’t mind my saying so.  She said you’d got over it all right.  She wouldn’t be surprised if some day you married Norah.

“So you see,” he said, “you needn’t bother about Viola.  She knew you couldn’t keep it up for ever.”

“Keep what up?”

(I knew; but something in his tone or in his twinkle made me pretend I didn’t.)

“Your wonderful attitude,” he said.  “She meant you to marry Norah.”