his knowledge to himself.

And when I'd finished he said, "The whole thing's a mystery to _me_. I
thought she was going to marry you." And then--"How she can stick him I
can't think. D'you mind, old man, if I go to bed? No, I don't want any
whisky and soda, thanks."

It was Pavitt, of all people, who threw a light on it when he brought the
whisky.

"Beg your pardon, sir," said Pavitt, "but I believe I never told you that
the Captain called here one day when you was in Belgium."

"Are you quite sure, Pavitt? He called the day I left."

"Yes, sir, I remember his calling the day you left. It's only just come
back to me that he called again, three days after, I think it was. I
told him you was gone to Belgium, and he said that was all he wanted. He
didn't leave no message, else I should have remembered. It was the young
gentleman's likeness to Mrs. Jevons, sir, what fixed him in my mind."

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-