Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.
But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as well have told her that he was dead.
Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.
"You knew this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told me?"
I said I had only known it last night—how could I have told her?
She persisted. "You knew—at what time last night?"
I hesitated and she drove it home.
"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."
I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was too late to wire.
"Do you suppose," she said, "—if I'd known—that I should be here?"