e's glad the poor
chap has pulled it off.

Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind,
Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."

Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for
the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had
dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened--what did
happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.

We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't
have approved of this.)

He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his
reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.

"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"

I said I did. And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very
questionable taste.

He said, "You never really knew the joke. I kept it from you most
carefully. That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the
half-crown was my last half-crown. I had to go without any dinner for
three days."

I mumbled something about his not meaning it.

He said, "Of course I meant it. Why, my dear chap, that's the joke!"

He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter. Then he saw our
faces.

"I say, I wouldn't have told you if I'd thought it would harrow you like
that. Thought you'd think it funny. It _is_ funny."

I said, "No, my dear fellow, it's just missed being funny."

I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen
Viola's face and I didn't want him to see it.) I led him gently
downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder. He was a little grieved at
giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.

At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his
ungovernable twinkle. "It _was_ funny," he said. "But it wasn't half so
funny, Furnival, as your face."

I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over
it and her head bowed on them. And she was crying--crying with little
soft sobs. I've said that I didn't think she could do it. And I didn't.
She wasn't the sort that cries. I'm convinced she hadn't cried like this
for years, perhaps never since she was a child.

I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft,
warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her
pocket-handkerchief. And like a child she abandoned herself to my--to my
rectitude. She truste