“Because,” she said, “there’s no use worrying them.  They’d have tried to stop me.  You can’t imagine what an awful fuss they’d have made.  I daresay I might never have got off at all.”

What I couldn’t understand was her attitude.  I mean I couldn’t reconcile the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.

Her manner was supremely assured.

It wasn’t, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that I couldn’t have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and blundering.  In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment when I upset her by telling her about Reggie’s sailing, she showed an extraordinary tranquillity.

But as I couldn’t understand her I simply said, “I wish you hadn’t got off.”

She said in that same quiet way, “I had to.”

“Because,” I said, “he made you.”

Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in.  I wasn’t going to keep him out now to spare her.  I had a right to know the truth.  She had shaken my conclusions.  She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know.  I was determined to know now and end it.  That shows that I must have trusted her; that I knew she wouldn’t lie to me.

“But,” she said, with the least perceptible surprise, “he didn’t make me.”

“He told me he did.”

“He told you?—­What did he say exactly?”

“He said—­if you must know—­that he hadn’t brought you, but that he had made you come.”

“He didn’t.  He didn’t really.  But supposing he had—­what then?”

“You want me to tell you what I think of it?”

“Yes.”

“I think it was a beastly thing to make you do.  He couldn’t have done it—­you know he couldn’t have done it—­if he hadn’t been a bit of a blackguard.”

I was going to say, “as well as a bounder”; but I didn’t want to rub that in.  I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be full enough without my pouring.

“But, you see,” she said, still peaceably, “he didn’t do it.  He only said he did.  That was his niceness.  He wanted to save me.”

“My dear child, if it’s saving you to bring you out here without your people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him everywhere—­”

“He didn’t bring me.  He said he wished I could come with him.  And I said I wished I could.  I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn’t.  Then he went off by himself.  He was all right till he got to Bruges.  Then he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week without seeing any more of it, because he couldn’t bear to know what I was missing.  He was going to keep the other places till we could see them together.  So I wired to say I was coming, and I came.”