She said, “Everything’s happened.  It’s been awful.”

Her smile took on significance—­the whole wild irony of disaster.  Then she said, “They know.”

“All of them?  Your brother?”

“No.  Not Reggie.  He got away in time.  They won’t tell him.  They won’t even tell Bertie.  They’ll never talk about it.  But they know.”

I said, “Supposing they do know—­as long as other people don’t—­”

“But, Wally, that’s just it.  Everybody does know.”

I couldn’t take her quite seriously yet.  I asked her:  Was it the labels? and she said, No, she’d picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she’d had Heaven’s own luck at the station, nobody’d seen her on the up platform, and her people thought she’d come from London.  Of course they all asked her where she’d been, and she told them she wasn’t going to let on just yet, that it wasn’t good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved themselves they’d know some day.  She meant to tell them as soon as ever Reggie’d gone.  “Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them.”

“And do you know,” she said, “they thought I was rotting them, that I’d been in some stuffy place in the country all the time.”

“Then how on earth,” I said, “did they find out?”

“They didn’t.  They never do find out things.  They heard—­last night.  Somebody saw us.”

“Withers?” I said.  I’d thought of Withers at once.  But he didn’t seem likely.  He wasn’t back yet.

“No.  Not Withers.  Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger.  They were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in the pension.  They saw my name in the visitors’ book and it excited them.  It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished, so that they had to say they knew him.  And then of course the other people chipped in and told them all they knew about me.  Can’t you see them doing it?”

I could indeed.

“I never thought the pension was a good scheme,” she said; “but poor Jimmy would make me go to it.  He said it was safe.  You see how safe it was.”

I wasn’t quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.

“You say these people saw you.  You mean they saw you and Jevons?”

She smiled more than ever.  “No, Wally.  It was you they saw.”

I don’t know whether I was glad or sorry.  I believe I was both.  I was glad that Jevons—­the ugly element—­was disposed of.  I was sorry—­sorry, indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt—­when I thought of the impression Viola’s family had of me now; of the terms on which I should be received into it if I were received into it at all.  I couldn’t clear myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola’s sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.

“What on earth,” I said, “must your people think of me?”