with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two
wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on
each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the
Convent where we had left it.)

We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market
Place under the Belfry.

"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may
never see it again."

"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.

We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction,
we saw it for the first time.

We _might_ have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we
didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's
temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend,
and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night
and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And
there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the
Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick
till he nearly died.

We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.

XV

I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that
before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by
the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me
suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of
him, the things I have thought and felt--my furtive belittling of him, my
unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that
it would become a certainty.

I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us
whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right
sleeve.

I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for _you_ if you
don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.

But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.

I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from
Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and
that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my
fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and
sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to
the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that
Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons,