We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place,
talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.

He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following.
She came."

"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not
going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."

"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."

"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."

He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the
shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.

"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew.
But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."

* * * * *

He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would
make it all right. He had just realized--he had only just, after six days
of it, mind you, realized--that he had compromised her. I said I supposed
he realized it after Withers had seen them?

He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really
cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like
Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have
brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought
of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got
out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it
would do her good to cut everything--all the mimsy tosh she'd been
brought up in and hated--to get out of it all--just to do one splendid
bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.

We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the
cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to
talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there
wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola
or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save
precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had
realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I
was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.

Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so
abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up
with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if
he had murdered Viola.

And yet, sitting there on