his bed, leaning forward with his head in his
hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round
her, he asserted persistently his innocence.

"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges--the
Belfry."

I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry without _you_?"

He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way,
Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at
all."

"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."

"It wouldn't have been the same thing for _her_. I wasn't thinking only
of myself. Who does?"

It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of
himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.

At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence
was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had done
_me_ about the worst injury that one man can do to another--at any rate,
I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every
appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly
doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous.
But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must
have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of
view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven
him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to
colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of
Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the
original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of
violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have
felt.

He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I
thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told
him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger
got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because
I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his
life--far from it--but because advertisement in these affairs was
undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about
this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account
alone.

He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was
the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me
call hi