I told Reggie this the next day as an instance of Pavitt’s wonderful memory.  “Only,” I said, “he forgot to tell me that you called.”

He smiled rather bitterly as if he remembered the incident well.

“Oh, I called all right,” he said.  “I wanted to know where you were.”

After that Norah and I made it out between us.  Not all at once, but bit by bit, as things occurred to us or as he suggested them.

He must have begun to suspect something when the time went on and Viola didn’t turn up.  Only he thought it was I who was at the bottom of it.  Perhaps, so long as he thought it was I, he had made up his mind that there could be no great harm in it.  He had been all right with her down at Canterbury those last few days.  Anyhow, he hadn’t said anything.

Then—­when he heard that she had married Jevons—­he had his idea.  It wasn’t necessary for him to have heard anything else.  And then, even if he hadn’t guessed it, there was Jimmy’s book, the “Flemish Journal,” to tell him she had been in Belgium with him.  And he knew she didn’t marry him till afterwards.

And so, he thought things.  If he didn’t think them of Viola he thought them of Jevons. (Even on the most charitable assumption he would consider his sister’s passion for Jimmy a piece of morbid perversity.) And anyhow, he was left with an appalling doubt.

And he wasn’t going to forgive either of them, ever.

IX

That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when I met Burton Withers.  For eventually I did meet him.  It was at the end of June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the hundredth night of Jimmy’s play.  That is what I remember it by.

Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy.  Withers had come in with a friend, an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round.  Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance he certainly had with Jevons.  He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences.  This was in the interval between the First and Second Acts.  When the curtain rose on Act Two, I was alone in Jimmy’s box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers came to me there.  It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come on.  He didn’t suppose any of us had thought of this four years ago when we had all met together in Bruges.

I said, “Did we all meet together in Bruges?”

“Well, if it wasn’t in Ghent.  Oh—­of course it was at Ghent you and I met.  You hadn’t joined the others then.”

At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions.  I couldn’t think what point he was making for or where he would come out.  He seemed to be trying uneasily to get somewhere.  Then I saw that he had had it on his mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had become a celebrity (I knew Withers’s little weakness for celebrities).  And he was scared.