g there and looking down at him--half frightened--through
the glass screen, and how he had said to me, "I couldn't. She was so
helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I couldn't."

It was the same room and the same glass screen and the same stair. And it
was the same man. I knew him. I knew him. I had always known him. (Was
there ever any risk he hadn't taken?) I had never, really, for one
moment misunderstood.

I certainly knew why he "liked" his wound.

XIV

We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders
to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in
a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and
I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if
I had joined the war-correspondents.

Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the
khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in
a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me,
for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.

Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a
worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid
into me on Tuesday evening.

But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I
can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.

She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more
triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a
war-correspondent.

For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General
in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could
only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have
said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons,
and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to
last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring
the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no
means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of
the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to
have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet--perhaps
a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons--those
three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and
Marne and the long fight for Calais. Beca