We didn’t speak till we came into the Market-Place.  Then Jevons said quietly: 

“As it happens, we aren’t staying together in that damned hotel.  I’m staying in it by myself.  We were dining there and having breakfast when Withers spotted us.  You don’t suppose she’d let me take her to the same hotel, do you?  I got a room for her in a boarding-house.  Kept by some ladies.”

“What do you mean by bringing her here at all?  If,” I said, “you did bring her.”

He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.

“I brought her all right.  That’s to say, I made her come.”

“You mean you didn’t bring her?  She followed you?”

(I had to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)

We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place, talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.

He answered with a little spurt of anger.  “You can’t call it following.  She came.”

“Don’t prevaricate,” I said.  “She came because you made her come.  I’m not going to ask you why you made her.  It’s obvious.”

“Is it?” he said.  “I wish I knew why.  I wish to God I knew.”

“Don’t talk rot,” I said.  “You knew all right.  And she didn’t.”

He looked at me.  Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.

“No, Furnival,” he said.  “Before God I didn’t know.  Neither of us knew.  But I know now.  And I’m going to-morrow.”

* * * * *

He stuck to it that he was going.  He seemed to think that his going would make it all right.  He had just realized—­he had only just, after six days of it, mind you, realized—­that he had compromised her.  I said I supposed he realized it after Withers had seen them?

He said, No, it had come over him before that.  Neither of them really cared a damn about Withers.  Who was going to care what a beast like Withers thought or said?  It had come over him that he oughtn’t to have brought her here.  He wished he’d hung himself before he’d thought of it, but the fact was that he didn’t think.  He just felt when he got out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it would do her good to cut everything—­all the mimsy tosh she’d been brought up in and hated—­to get out of it all—­just to do one splendid bunk.  That, he said, was all it amounted to.

We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the cheapest room in the hotel.  You may wonder how I could have endured to talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there wasn’t anything else to be done.  After all, it wouldn’t have done Viola or me any good if I had wrung his neck.  It was, in fact, to save precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here.  I had realized so well what wringing Jevons’s neck would mean to Viola that I was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.