I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to compromise her in order to marry her—­even if I did find I couldn’t marry her in any other way.

I had hit him there.  He was quiet for a little while after it.  I didn’t look at him—­I didn’t want to look at him—­but I could feel him there, breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.

Presently he took the thing up again.  He went on, placably, quietly explaining.  “I thought of protecting her too.  Only I wasn’t such an idiot as to think of it before everything else.”

“No.  You were clever enough to think of it afterwards—­when you’d got what you wanted.  When you had compromised her.”

“I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted?  There, Furnival, you lie.”

I said I only meant that she was compromised.  At any rate, that was what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.

“If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it’ll look like that.  I can’t help how it looks to a set of old ladies and clergymen in Canterbury.  Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to me than it can to any of you people.”

I said he wouldn’t say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.

He laughed out at that.

“Suffer?  They haven’t suffered a quarter as much as I have.  Not a hundredth part as much.  They’ve suffered thinking of themselves—­of their precious respectability.  I’ve suffered thinking of her.

“Suffer?  I’ve been through all that.  It wasn’t right, Furnival, it wasn’t right for anybody to have to go through what I did.  But I’ve come out of it.  You’ve been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but if you think you can make me suffer more, you can’t.  I’m past it.”

I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him.  But it would be well if he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound to appear to other people.

“You admit, then,” he said, “that it appears more outrageous than it is?”

I said, “You see, my dear fellow, I don’t yet know what it is.”

He asked me if I’d like to know what it was?  And I told him that, certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he’d better perhaps make a clean breast of it while he was about it.

Well—­he made his clean breast.

He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in its truth.  I needn’t be frightened.  Nothing had happened.  Nothing beyond what I knew.  But—­there was a point, he said, when everything might have.  When he had meant that it should happen.

He hadn’t meant it at first.  Nothing had been further from him when he let her come to Bruges.  He had meant nothing—­nothing beyond looking at the Belfry.  He had thought—­as she did—­that it would be quite possible to be content with looking at the Belfry.  That was where the damned folly of the thing had come in.  They began to be aware of the folly when they found themselves going together to Antwerp.  He wasn’t aware even then of what he meant.  But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took her to Ghent.