t it's you--with your ridiculous
suspicions--that have given me away?"

Norah answered her.

"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to
tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."

To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."

I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and
implored me to "let her think."

"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it,
even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a
message, and you _have_ given me a message, and now you'll go and tell
Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and
_you_ rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."

"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes
home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning
train."

"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"

"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you
haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."

Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more
she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it
into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.

Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I
needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come
in all splashed with rain and covered with mud--"It won't be me," she
said, "you'll have to explain about."

And it wasn't.

The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought
that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been
a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in
the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he
had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say,
he was waiting for us.

Well--neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy
poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour
of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the
colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a
gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly,
a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur
was prostrated with admiration.

"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself,