I had to confess that Tasker Jevons was the chap who wrote it.  Reggie, quite prettily abashed, tried to recover himself and plunged further.  He brought up from his memory one thing after another.  And all his reminiscences were of Jevons.  He had mixed us up hopelessly, as people did in those days.  They knew I was associated with the Morning Standard, and that was all they knew about me; if they wanted to recall anything striking I had done, it was always Jevons they remembered.  Poor Reggie was so inveterate in his blundering that after his fourth desperate effort he gave it up.  His memory, he said, was rotten.

I said, on the contrary, his memory for Jevons was perfect, and he looked at me charmingly and laughed.

While he was laughing Viola came in.  She had Jevons with her.

It was evident that neither of them was prepared for Reggie Thesiger.  They had let themselves in with a latch-key and come straight upstairs without encountering Mrs. Pavitt.

At the sight of her brother Viola betrayed a feeling I should not have believed possible to her.  For the first and I may say the last, time in my experience of her, I saw Viola show funk.

It was the merest tremor of her tilted mouth, the flicker of an eyelash, an almost invisible veiling of her brilliant eyes; I do not think it would have been perceptible to anybody who watched her with a less tense anxiety than mine.  But it was there, and it hurt me to see it.

There was one person, only one person, in the world whom Viola was afraid of, and that was her brother Reggie.  She was afraid of him because she loved him.  He was the person in the world that she loved best, before—­before the catastrophe.  And this fear of hers that I alone saw (Reggie most certainly had not seen it) ought to have warned me if nothing else had.

It probably would have warned me but for what she did next; but for her whole subsequent behaviour.

She broke loose from Reggie, who had closed on her with a shout of “Hallo, Vee-Vee!” and an embrace; she broke loose from Reggie and turned to me, all laughing and rosy from his impact, with an outstretched hand and a voice that swept to me and rippled with a sort of nervous joy.  And she said:  “Oh, Wally, this is nice of you!  You’ll stop for tea.”

Her mouth said that.  But her eyes—­they had grown suddenly pathetic—­said a lot more.  They said:  “Don’t go, Wally, please don’t go.  Whatever you do, don’t leave me alone with him.”  At least, I can see now that that’s what they were saying.  And even at the time I saw on her dear face the same blessed relief (at finding me there) that I had seen on Reggie’s.

Neither Reggie nor I, mind you, had seen Jevons yet (I am speaking of fractions of seconds of time); and he wasn’t actually in the room; but Viola and I were aware of him outside.  If he had not paused on the landing to dispose of his overcoat and his hat and his stick, their entrance would have been simultaneous.