d she would not look at me.

Reggie (he really _was_ decent) tried to turn it off. "I wouldn't worry,
if I were you," he said. "Wait till the war comes."

"Oh, it's coming all right," said little Jevons. "No fear."

And as if he could no longer bear to contemplate his cowardice, he said
good-bye to us and left. Reggie's eyes followed his dejected, retreating
figure.

"How quaint!" he said. "But he's a smart chap, anyway. And, mind you,
he's right about that war."

I said (Heaven knows why, except that I think I must have wanted Reggie's
opinion of Jevons): "D'you think he's right about his own cowardice?"

Reggie said, "Ask me another. You can't tell. I only know I've seen men
look like that and talk like that before an engagement."

Viola raised her head. Her voice came with the clear tremor of a bell:
"And did they funk?"

"They didn't run away, if that's what you mean. I daresay they felt like
Jevons. I've felt like Jevons myself."

Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk
about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie.
But here again I am not quite sure. I don't really know.

I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me
that night.

Jevons had stayed till half-past six. He had talked for two hours and a
half. When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come
and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.

She said, All right. She was on. And Furny would come too.

He said, of course I was coming too. That was what he had meant (it
wasn't).

And in the end I went. I say in the end--for of course I protested. It
was his one evening with his sister. But Viola's poor eyes signalled to
me and implored me: "Don't leave me alone with him, whatever you do." She
wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask
her: "Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?"

But the question never came. To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by
the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons. And then
Viola's game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through
dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play. And though
Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for
granted--and no wonder--that she and I were, well, on the brink of an
engagement if we hadn't fallen in. As for Jevons, he simply couldn't
have conceive