Jevons didn’t turn up for dinner.

I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern gate of the city.  He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet and looking into the water.  Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons—­the trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets—­were indistinct.  But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture that I could see his dejection, his despair.  The posture ought to have disarmed me, but it didn’t.

He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his ground.  It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” he said.

I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that little beast Withers.

I said, “I daresay you did.  I saw Withers this morning.”

He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.

I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.

“I see,” he said.  “He’s told you.”

I said Withers had told me nothing I didn’t know.

“You didn’t know anything,” he said.  “You simply came here to find out.”

I said:  Yes, that was what I had come for.

“Well,” he went on; “there isn’t much to find out.  She’s here.  And I’m here.  And Withers saw us yesterday.  As he told you.”

He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact.  He knew that I had tracked him down, but he didn’t resent it.  I felt more than ever that this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost intimated, might have been so much worse.  I didn’t know then that his calmness was the measure of his trust in me.

“The really beastly thing,” he said, “was Withers seeing us.”

I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.

He said, “The canal water is filthy.  But it isn’t filthier than—­it isn’t half so filthy as your imagination.  Your imagination, Furnival, is like the main sewer of this city.”

He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness, as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.

“But,” he went on, “even your imagination isn’t as obscene as Withers’s.  You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger.”

“He said that she—­that you were staying together in the same hotel.”

“Why shouldn’t we?  It’s a pretty big hotel.  Do you mind my going back to it?”

I said grimly that I was going back to it myself.  I wasn’t going to let Jevons out of my sight.  I felt as if I had taken him into custody.

We went back.