"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."
I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.
He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe him?"
I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."
I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of the affair that—as a man of the world—he had found it so hard to swallow—"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."
He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:
"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"
I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a village somewhere in Hertfordshire.
And then: "Is he—is he very impossible?"
I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.