I was glad, of course.  But Viola was more than glad.  She was excited, agitated.  She jumped up and said:  “Oh, Jimmy!” (She called him Jimmy, and her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) “Jimmy!  How simply spiffing!”

And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is her hour.

And I thought even then:  It’s nothing.  It’s only that she’s glad the poor chap has pulled it off.

Then she said:  “Let’s all go and dine somewhere together.  You don’t mind, Furny dear, do you?  I’ll take it home and sit up with it.”

Oh, I didn’t mind.  We all went somewhere and dined together.  We went, for the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had dined with Jevons for the first time.  That was how it happened—­what did happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.

We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn’t have approved of this.)

He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his reminiscence.  The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.

“I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?”

I said I did.  And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very questionable taste.

He said, “You never really knew the joke.  I kept it from you most carefully.  That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the half-crown was my last half-crown.  I had to go without any dinner for three days.”

I mumbled something about his not meaning it.

He said, “Of course I meant it.  Why, my dear chap, that’s the joke!”

He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter.  Then he saw our faces.

“I say, I wouldn’t have told you if I’d thought it would harrow you like that.  Thought you’d think it funny.  It is funny.”

I said, “No, my dear fellow, it’s just missed being funny.”

I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen Viola’s face and I didn’t want him to see it.) I led him gently downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder.  He was a little grieved at giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.

At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his ungovernable twinkle.  “It was funny,” he said.  “But it wasn’t half so funny, Furnival, as your face.”

I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over it and her head bowed on them.  And she was crying—­crying with little soft sobs.  I’ve said that I didn’t think she could do it.  And I didn’t.  She wasn’t the sort that cries.  I’m convinced she hadn’t cried like this for years, perhaps never since she was a child.

I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft, warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her pocket-handkerchief.  And like a child she abandoned herself to my—­to my rectitude.  She trusted in it utterly.  I might have been her brother Reggie.