“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, sir,” he said to me as we retreated, “he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin’ masterpiece.”

I tried to explain about Viola an hour later.  But he wouldn’t listen to me.  That was all right, he said.  He was going to ask us to take her for a month or so anyhow.  It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.

Then he fixed me with “Did Thesiger go up with her?”

There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been Thesiger’s idea, but Viola hadn’t cared much about having him, for she had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.

“I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her.  He’s fool enough for anything,” said Jimmy.  But he reverted.  “I still can’t see why you took the car out.  Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain.”

BOOK III

HIS BOOK

XII