That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy’s wife didn’t seem to bother Jimmy in the least.

Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car.  He still clung—­I could see that he clung—­to the superstition of its sanctity.

He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter.  I think he was afraid of seeing Viola.  I thought at the time that this was because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself.  And yet I was puzzled.  Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings.  He may have had an inkling.  There may have been something of his queer, scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then his main object was—­like Viola—­to burn his boats.  He was afraid that if he were to see Viola again he wouldn’t be able to go through with it.  He may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his way easier.

And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.

He didn’t go back to Amershott.  He stayed in London in one of his clubs (he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him sometimes.  I didn’t say anything to Viola about him.  I didn’t tell her he was in town.  It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him and me.

Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.

I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must have felt some horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own.  But as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of his opinions, his vision, his horror and excitement.  I seem to have spent the greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in looking back, when he fills the scene.  He is the largest and most prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace, when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard.  It is as if I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when the Ultimatum was declared.