She said surprisingly, “They think you a perfect dear.”

“What, for carrying you off to Belgium?  That’s what I seem to have done.  I don’t quite see how I’m to get out of it unless we can persuade them that we met by accident.”

“Oh,” she said, “I got you out of it all right.”

I asked her, “How?”

She said, “I told them the truth.  I said it wasn’t you; it was Jimmy.”

“What did you do that for?”

“Because it was Jimmy I went off with.  You’re all right.  They know it’s Jimmy.”

I groaned.  “That’s precisely what I’ve been trying to prevent them knowing.”

“They know that, too.  I told them that you came out to look for me—­like a lamb, to save me—­and that you made me come back.  They think that was dear of you.”

She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.

“You see,” she said, “I’ve saved you.”

I could only say, “My dear child—­have you saved yourself?”

She was visibly troubled.

“I think—­I think they believe me.  They say they do.  But they don’t understand.  That’s why I sent for you.  I want you to make them see.”

“Make them see what?” I said. (It was clumsy of me.)

“What it really was,” she said.

I asked her if they knew I was there.  She said, Yes, they were coming in to see me.

“They want to see you.  They want to know.”

I saw then what my work was to be.  I was not only to witness to her innocence and Jevons’s—­if they doubted it; I was to show them what she had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it appeared to her.  I was to show them Jevons’s beauty.

Well, I thought, it’ll take some showing.

“Do they,” I asked her, “at all realize Jevons?”

“Yes.  They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms.  Of course I had to say he was.  It’s almost a pity Reggie met him.  That’s what’s frightened them.  You see, he only saw the funny part of him.”

(I could imagine what Reggie’s description of the funny part of Jevons had been.)

I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.

She said, “Yes.  And I’ve made it worse by telling them I’m going to marry Jimmy.”

“And I’m to persuade them that that’s the best thing you can do, am I?”

She said, Yes—­if I could do that—­

I said I couldn’t.  I couldn’t persuade myself.  How could I, when I was convinced that the best thing she could do was to marry me?

She said she’d forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of it to her.  “It’s about Bruges,” she said, “that I want you to tell them.”

“I can’t very well if they don’t ask me,” I expounded.

“Oh, but,” she said, “they will ask you.  At least Daddy will.”

* * * * *