I told him that I hadn’t, and that I didn’t know how to get it, either.

He said, “It’s a rotten habit she’s got of sloping off like this without telling you.”  It wouldn’t matter, only his regiment was ordered off to India.  He was sailing next week.  She was to have come down to Canterbury for Easter and she hadn’t.  If he only knew the people she was stopping with—­if he’d any idea of the town or the village or the county, he’d try and find her.  But she might be in the Hebrides for all he knew.

I said I was sorry I couldn’t help.  All I knew was she had gone into the country (I didn’t know it, but I assumed the knowledge for her protection).  She had told me she might be going (she had), and I didn’t think she’d be away for more than a day or two.  I was pretty sure she’d be back before he sailed.

I’d no reason, you see, to suppose she wouldn’t be.  Anyhow, I satisfied him.

I marvel now at the ease with which I did it.  But he was used to Viola’s casual behaviour; and the monstrous improbability of the thing she had done this time was her cover.  Who in the world would have dreamed that she would go off with Jevons?  I don’t really know that I dreamed it myself at the moment.  I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the certainty that came later.  But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn’t suspect me.  I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved me with her brother.

He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit.

I went straight to Jevons’s rooms in Bernard Street.  Jevons was away.  Had been away since Easter.  His landlady couldn’t give me his address.  He hadn’t told them where he was going to, and they rather thought he was abroad.  His letters were all forwarded to his publishers. They might give me his address.

I went to his publishers.  They wouldn’t give me his address.  They weren’t allowed to give addresses, but they would forward any letters to Mr. Jevons.  I said I was a friend of Mr. Jevons’s.  Could they at least tell me whether he was or was not in England?  They said that when they had last heard from him he was not.

Then I went down to Fleet Street, to his editor, my editor.  He couldn’t give me Jevons’s address because he hadn’t got it.  He rang up the office.  In the office they rather thought Jevons was in Belgium.  They’d had a manuscript from him posted at Ostend.  They looked up the date.  It was three days ago.

I sailed that night for Ostend.