“They didn’t run away, if that’s what you mean.  I daresay they felt like Jevons.  I’ve felt like Jevons myself.”

Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie.  But here again I am not quite sure.  I don’t really know.

I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me that night.

Jevons had stayed till half-past six.  He had talked for two hours and a half.  When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.

She said, All right.  She was on.  And Furny would come too.

He said, of course I was coming too.  That was what he had meant (it wasn’t).

And in the end I went.  I say in the end—­for of course I protested.  It was his one evening with his sister.  But Viola’s poor eyes signalled to me and implored me:  “Don’t leave me alone with him, whatever you do.”  She wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask her:  “Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?”

But the question never came.  To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons.  And then Viola’s game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play.  And though Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for granted—­and no wonder—­that she and I were, well, on the brink of an engagement if we hadn’t fallen in.  As for Jevons, he simply couldn’t have conceived him in that connection.  To Reggie, Jevons was simply an amusing little scallywag who could write.  That Viola should have taken Jevons seriously surpassed his imagination of the possible.  So that she never was in any danger of discovery, and there was no need for her manoeuvres.  He couldn’t have so much as found out that she had gone for a walk with Jevons, because it wouldn’t have entered his head that you could go for a walk with him.  People didn’t do these things.

Besides, he never was alone with her that evening.  She took good care of that.  She insisted on dropping him at his hotel, which we passed on our way northwards.  She actually said to him, “You must get out here.  Furny’ll see me home.  I want to talk to him.”

And instead of talking to me, she sat leaning forward with her back half turned to me, staring through the window at nothing at all.

That was how I came to propose to Viola in the taxi.  I had been afraid to do it before.  I wasn’t going to do it at all unless I was sure of her.  But it seemed to me that she had been trying all afternoon and all evening to tell me that I might be sure.

* * * * *