Because he did take her there.  He meant—­then—­exactly what Viola’s father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if they took a woman to Ghent.

“I meant,” he said, “to compromise her.  But—­here’s where you went wrong—­I didn’t mean to compromise her in order to marry her.  I didn’t mean to marry her at all.  There was a moment when I thought that marrying me—­tying herself up to me for ever—­was a risk I ought not to let her take.  I thought—­I thought I could make her happy without all that awful risk.  It seemed to me that after the risk we had taken we had a right to happiness.  Certainly she had.  And I thought she thought the same.

“So I took her to Ghent.

“I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.

“I ought to tell you that we did have rooms in the same hotel in Antwerp and Ghent.  There weren’t any English there that mattered—­nobody that either of us knew.

“But when I’d got her to Ghent I couldn’t—­I don’t know how it was—­but it came over me that I couldn’t—­I hadn’t the courage.  I think I found out that she was afraid or something.  We’d taken rooms in that hotel you were in in the Place d’Armes.  We were sitting together in the lounge—­you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass partition in it along the staircase—­you can see people through it going up and down stairs.  She’d got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said good night.  And there was a look in her eyes—­Fright, a sort of fright.

“I saw her through the glass going up the stair.  When she got to the landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the lounge, to make sure I was still there.

“She looked so helpless somehow—­and so pretty—­that for the life of me I couldn’t.

“No.

“I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the pension with those women.”

I thought of the irony of it.

If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed it up.  If he hadn’t repented, if he hadn’t taken her back to Bruges and put her in the pension with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn’t have seen them and General Thesiger’s friends wouldn’t have heard of them.  I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury being a bit the wiser.

But I didn’t tell Jevons that.  I hadn’t the heart to.

We stayed three days longer in Bruges.  There were still some odd corners of the city that he hadn’t had time to look up.

Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.

After we got back to England Jevons’s affairs picked up and went forward with a rush.  His novel came out at the end of May.  In June he was made sub-editor of Sport, and thus acquired a settled income.  And one morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany: