“All the more—­all the more, Furnival, if she is my daughter.”

I said he owed it to his priesthood to stand up for an innocent girl, even if she was his daughter.  I couldn’t see anything in it but her innocence—­her amazing innocence.  I only wished I had his chance of proving it.

He shook his head.  “That’s it, my dear fellow.  We can’t prove it.”

I said at least we could believe in it and act on our belief.

He said it was all very well for me.  I was prejudiced.

“My sort of prejudice,” I said, “might work the other way.”

“You must have been afraid, or you wouldn’t have gone out to bring her back.”

“Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter.  When things got dangerous he took her back to Bruges and put her in a pension to be safe from him.”

He looked up sharply.

“She never told me that—­that he took her there to be safe from him.”

“I don’t suppose she knew.  She was as innocent as all that.”

“And how do you know?”

“Because he told me so.”

I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.

“That,” said the Canon, “seems to make him more credible.”

I pictured for him the night of Jevons’s remorse.

He said, “That’s the best thing I’ve heard about him yet.  You believe him?”

I said, “Yes.  The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank.”

I let it sink in.  Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of the affair that—­as a man of the world—­he had found it so hard to swallow—­“All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry.”

He meditated a while.  Then he began to ask questions: 

“Where does he come from?  Who are his people?  What do they do?”

I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a village somewhere in Hertfordshire.

And then:  “Is he—­is he very impossible?”

I said, No.  Only from their point of view a little improbable.

He didn’t press it.

“Well,” he said, “it looks as if he was inevitable.  I suppose we’ve got to make the best of him.  What do you want me to do?”

I said I wanted him to ask them down.  Very soon.

He said, “All right, Furnival.  I’ll ask them down next week.  But if I do you must stop on and see me through.  I won’t be left alone with him.”

I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah, who was more than ever determined to beat me.

And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.

* * * * *

The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter.  It took such a lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him.  And it was not a job I would have chosen.  But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that was all.  And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral Close.