Well—he made his clean breast.
He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond what I knew. But—there was a point, he said, when everything might have. When he had meant that it should happen.
He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing—nothing beyond looking at the Belfry. He had thought—as she did—that it would be quite possible to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took her to Ghent.
Because he did take her there. He meant—then—exactly what Viola's father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if they took a woman to Ghent.
"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But—here's where you went wrong—I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying me—tying herself up to me for ever—was a risk I ought not to let her take. I thought—I thought I could make her happy without all that awful risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we had taken we had a right to happiness. Certainly she had. And I thought she thought the same.
"So I took her to Ghent.
"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.
"I ought to tell you that we did have rooms in the same hotel in Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered—nobody that either of us knew.
"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't—I don't know how it was—but it came over me that I couldn't—I hadn't the courage. I think I found out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel you were in in the Place d'Armes. We were sitting together in the lounge—you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass partition in it along the staircase—you can see people through it going up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said good night. And there was a look in her eyes—Fright, a sort of fright.
"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the lounge, to make sure I was still there.