A great deal of this he did say to me.  He said it very simply, without phrases.

Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry Viola.  But—­he didn’t think that he could let me do it.  If I had only come to him three weeks ago—­

He hadn’t been able—­naturally—­to talk about it last night.  He had hoped he wouldn’t have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.

It couldn’t have been worse if I’d seen him about to put a knife into his breast.  I tried to stop him, but he would do it, he would put the knife in.

“We don’t know,” he said, “what may have occurred at Bruges.”

“Nothing occurred,” I said, “nothing that you need mind.”

He said, “That’s what the child tells me.”

And I, “Surely, sir, you believe her word?”

Of course—­of course he believed her word.  Viola, he said, might keep the truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it would not be good for them to know it.  But she had never told them an untruth.  Never.  She was—­essentially—­truthful.

“Only,” he said, “we don’t know what she may have been driven to.  She may have been trying to shield that man Jevons.”

I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent.  It looked as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola’s joining him in Bruges.

But the Canon didn’t want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or otherwise.  Or what Viola had thought.  “It’s what they’ve done,” he said.  “You can’t get over it.”

I said what they’d done didn’t amount to more than, looking at the Belfry.  I could very easily get over that.

He said that I was an Israelite indeed.  But the world wasn’t all Belfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.

“They travelled together, Furnival.  They travelled together.”

I said, “Yes.  And it wasn’t till they’d got to Bruges the second time that Jevons realized that they never ought to.  As soon as he did realize it, he cleared out.”

He did that too late, the Canon insisted.  It was no good my trying to shield Jevons.  It wasn’t easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had done her was irreparable.

“Not,” I said, “if she marries me.”

He said, “My dear boy, supposing—­supposing it isn’t all as innocent as you think?  You can’t marry her.”

I said that made no difference.  It was all the more reason.

All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.

That, he said, was what they’d have to go into.

But there I took a high stand.  I said it was for me to go into it, and if I didn’t, why should they?  If I believed in Viola, surely they might?  If I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful, wasn’t my knowledge good enough for them?  I said, “I shall go to her at once and ask her to marry me.”