"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"
She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It was you they saw."
I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was glad that Jevons—the ugly element—was disposed of. I was sorry—sorry, indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt—when I thought of the impression Viola's family had of me now; of the terms on which I should be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.
"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"
She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."
"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done. I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them that we met by accident."
"Oh," she said, "I got you out of it all right."
I asked her, "How?"
She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."
"What did you do that for?"