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.

Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at
Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all
this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola
till she had forgotten all about it. She would never have listened to me
while the trail of the scandal still lingered.

In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then
that saved me.

* * * * *

It saved me to suffer. I didn't know it was possible to suffer as she
made me suffer--I mean as _they_ made me, between them.

It didn't begin all at once. It didn't begin, really, for another three
months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself. Not
even then. Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself
another six months as soon as he saw her. He was always giving himself
these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was
always having some prodigious bet on himself. I never knew a man back his
own enterprises as he did.

But until he turned up again I was happy. I say I, not we. I don't know
whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it. I had enough sense
to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had no