“Not know what fear is!

“Just conceive,” said Jimmy, “a man living like that, in abject, abominable terror, in black funk—­keeping it up, all day and half the night, for five solid weeks—­before he got there.”

“And when you did get there,” said Reggie, “were you in a funk?”

“Oh, well, you see, by the time I’d got there it had pretty well worn itself out.  There wasn’t any funk left to be in.”

And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.

Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again.  The kind of virtue his brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn’t help him, you see, to that particular solution.  And with the Thesigers—­when they took after their mother—­things died hard.

He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.

Viola told us what happened.

It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of Reggie’s.  He had just said that Viola wouldn’t care how many Town Halls he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn’t go and dig him out.  And then, suddenly, he went straight for it.

“Jimmy,” he said, “did you run away with my sister, or didn’t you?  I don’t care whether you did or not, but—­did you?”

“No, I didn’t,” said Jimmy.

“Then what the dickens,” Reggie said, “were you doing together in Bruges?”

“We were looking at the Belfry,” said Jimmy.

And Reggie shook his head.  “That’s beyond me,” he said.

“Yes,” said Viola.  “But it wasn’t beyond Jimmy.”

That’s the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.

Don’t ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn’t been a war.

I’ve tried to show you the sort of man he was.  He knew his hour even before it found him.  And you cannot separate him from his hour.