I said:  “You mustn’t mind.  He was only rotting us.”  And she said:  “He wasn’t.  It was true.  He told me that six months ago he was starving.”

I said:  “Vee-Vee, if he was, you mustn’t think about him.  You mustn’t, really.”

Then she drew away from me and dried her eyes herself, carefully and efficiently, and said in a calm and measured voice:  “I’m not thinking about him.”

I went on as if I hadn’t heard her:  “You mustn’t be sorry for him.  Jevons is quite clever enough to take care of himself.  He isn’t a bit pathetic.  You mustn’t let him get at you that way.”

She raised her head with her old, high defiance.  “He isn’t trying to get at me.  I’m not sorry for him—­any more than he’s sorry for himself.”

I said, “You don’t know.  You’re just a dear little ostrich hiding its head in the sand.”

“No,” she said.  “No.  I’m not a fool, Furny.  Even an ostrich isn’t such a fool as it looks.  It doesn’t imagine for a moment that it isn’t seen.  It hides its head because it knows it’s going to be caught, anyway, and it’s afraid of seeing what’s going to catch it.”

I asked her then, Was she afraid?

She was standing beside me now, leaning back against my writing-table.  Her two hands clutched the edge of it.  Her eyes had a far-seeing, candid gaze.

“I’m not afraid,” she said, “of anything outside me.  Only of things inside me—­sometimes.”

“What sort of things?”

She smiled, the queerest little, far-off smile.

“Oh, funny things—­things you wouldn’t understand, Furny.”

To that I said, “I wish you’d marry me, Viola.”

She shrugged her shoulders and said, so did she, and it was much worse for her than it was for me.  And then:  “Do you know, Reggie liked you immensely.  He told me so.”

I said it would be more to the point if she did.  But since she didn’t, since she couldn’t marry me, I wished—­“I wish,” I said, “you’d go back to Canterbury and marry some nice man like Reggie.”

“Can’t you see,” she cried, “that I shall never marry a nice man like Reggie?”

III

The next thing that happened was that she went off with Jevons.

At least, to all appearances she went off with him.  They were in Belgium, at Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent and Bruges again together.  I found them at Bruges after having tracked them through all the other places.

It was Captain Thesiger who started me.  Reggie (whose family seemed to employ him chiefly to find out what Viola was up to) had called at my rooms after Easter to ask me if I could give him his sister’s address.  He said they hadn’t got it at Hampstead, where he had been to see her, and they didn’t know where she was staying.  They thought it was in the country somewhere, and that she wouldn’t be very long away, as she told them not to forward any letters.  He thought I might possibly have her address.