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."

"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the
ceiling four inches."

"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jev