There was.  But I didn’t tell her who put them there.

The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on the Heath.

Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a word about engaging her.)

This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola conducted her affairs.  The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced, or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn’t go with him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up.  He was a guileless and indeed a holy man; and it’s always the guileless and the holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals.  And Mrs. Thesiger wrote, and the General and the Dean; and I’ve no doubt the Archbishop would have written too, if I hadn’t unearthed my General at his club, and asked him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could.  I said he might tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she would have got into rooms in—­I named the street, and testified to the sinister character of the house.  And my General wrote and explained to the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger.  I’m not at all sure that he didn’t even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine—­better, it would seem, than I did).  In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap, and that the father of seven daughters (five unmarried) might do far worse than cultivate my acquaintance.  He must have gone quite as far as that, or farther, otherwise I couldn’t account for the peculiarly tender note that the Minor Canon put into the letter of apology that he wrote me, still less for the invitation I received by the same post from Mrs. Thesiger to spend Whitsuntide with them at Canterbury. (Viola had said she was going home for Whitsuntide.)

Dear lady, she was herself the daughter of a Canon, and she had lived all her life in a cathedral close, and the atmosphere of a cathedral close may foster innocence, but I cannot think it could have been entirely responsible for the kind of indiscretion Mrs. Thesiger was guilty of.  Neither do I think Mrs. Thesiger was entirely responsible herself.  She is a nice woman, and I am sure she couldn’t have written as she did unless my friend the General had led her to believe that there was some sort of an understanding between me and Viola.  But still, for all she knew about me, I might have been a villain.  Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way inappreciable to my friend the General.