e's told you."

I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.

"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."

I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.

"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm
here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."

He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the
thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I
had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that
this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost
intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his
calmness was the measure of his trust in me.

"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."

I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having
brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over
the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.

He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than--it isn't
half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like
the main sewer of this city."

He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness,
as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.

"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's.
You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."

"He said that she--that you were staying together in the same hotel."

"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to
it?"

I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to let
Jevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.

We went back.

We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said
quietly:

"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm
staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when
Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same
hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some
ladies."

"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "you _did_
bring her."

He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.

"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."

"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"

(I _had_ to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)