“Not me.  Not much.  I wouldn’t let Viola cross in the same boat with that lot.

“It ought to be put a stop to.

“The place I’m going to—­the things I’m going to see—­and to do—­aren’t fit for women—­aren’t fit for women to come within ten miles of.  Whatever you do, Furny—­and I don’t care what you do—­you’re not to let her get out.”

I suppose—­I suppose I made him some sort of promise.  He says I did.  I don’t remember.

I do remember telling him I thought it was a pity—­if he meant to go out—­that he hadn’t seen Viola all this time.

And I remember his answer.  “I haven’t seen her—­all this time—­because I meant to go out.  I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me.”

“How do you know,” I said, “that she’d have stopped you?”

“How do I know?  How do I know anything?—­It’s you who don’t know.  You don’t know anything at all.”

* * * * *

Well, he went—­like that—­without telling any of them.

I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur—­he, as he pointed out to me, superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki.  “Otherwise there isn’t a pin to choose between us.  Except,” he said, “that Kendal doesn’t funk it and I do.”

And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons’s delicious joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal’s grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged appropriate, we parted.

Jimmy’s last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, “Don’t run after me, Furny.  You won’t catch me this time.”

XIII

Then I went back and told Viola about it.  I took her into my library that had once been Jevons’s study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack.  I gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at Folkestone.  I suppose he had explained things in it.

But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as well have told her that he was dead.

Except that perhaps then she wouldn’t have turned on me.

“You knew this,” she said, “you knew he was going and you never told me?”

I said I had only known it last night—­how could I have told her?

She persisted.  “You knew—­at what time last night?”

I hesitated and she drove it home.

“You might have wired.  It wasn’t too late.”

I said it was, and that I didn’t know that she didn’t know till it was too late to wire.

“Do you suppose,” she said, “—­if I’d known—­that I should be here?”

I couldn’t tell her—­she was so white under her wound and the shock of it—­I couldn’t tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that she would be with him.