Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening.  I felt as if I were shut up with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if he had murdered Viola.

And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round her, he asserted persistently his innocence.

“Practically,” he said, “I brought her out to look at Bruges—­the Belfry.”

I said:  “Good God!  Couldn’t she look at the Belfry without you?”

He shook his head and replied very gravely:  “Not in the same way, Furnival.  Not in the same way.  It wouldn’t have been the same thing at all.”

“You mean it wouldn’t have been the same for you, you little bounder.”

“It wouldn’t have been the same thing for her.  I wasn’t thinking only of myself.  Who does?”

It was as if he had said:  “Who that loves as I love thinks only of himself?” But I missed that.  I was too angry.

At least I suppose I was too angry.  I must have been.  Jevons’s offence was unspeakable, or seemed so.  He had outraged all decencies.  He had done me about the worst injury that one man can do to another—­at any rate, I wasn’t sure that he hadn’t.  How could I have been sure!  Every appearance was against him.  Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly doubt.  It was preposterous, his candour.  His innocence was preposterous.  But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must have appeared to me at the time.  I am saturated with Jevons’s point of view.  I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me.  All this is bound to colour my record and confuse me.  I have impression upon impression of Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have felt.

He didn’t care a rap about me and my abhorrence.  He asked me what I thought I was doing when I came out here?  He simply smiled when I told him I’d come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his life—­far from it—­but because advertisement in these affairs was undesirable.  I didn’t want Viola’s family or anybody else to know about this instance.  It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account alone.

He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was the line I would take.  It was his little meditative pose that made me call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on the line that would be taken.

He said quietly, “The word thundering is singularly inappropriate.  There’s nothing thundering about me.  I haven’t calculated anything.  As for hushing it up, I’m hushing it up myself, thank you.  Haven’t I told you I’m going to-morrow?  Can’t you see that I’m packing?”