angway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she
flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it was _you_ I went off with.
They won't mind that half so much."

I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I
had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding
Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had
gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and
Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.

It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says
you _didn't_ make her come. She proposed coming herself."

He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't
likely she'd propose a thing like that."

His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his
vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come
to him.

Well, I suppose in a sense he _had_ made her.

IV

We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it.
He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till
I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so
far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy
either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and
by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he
didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I
don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only
know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the
melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day
that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.

He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was
this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence,
as if Viola hadn't given it me already.

It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our
remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if
he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his
misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust
in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he
looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same
confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had
shaken his