between us.

Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother
Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten
Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe
of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And
in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.

In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no
sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with
Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of
Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the
same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to
be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if _I_
would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion
in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything
that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before
or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her
freshness declared how admirably _she_ had forgotten. It wasn't as if we
didn't know what we were really out for.

Except that she was a maturer person--thirty-one and not twenty-two--I
might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in
defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in
Belgium, and taking the war, since there _was_ a war on, in her stride.

And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I
had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling
thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same
time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have
been aware of this oddness--for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do
you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be
running away with you?"

I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my
attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the
transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent
innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's
apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the
trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the
other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now,
perhaps, when I'm running