"She looked so helpless somehow—and so pretty—that for the life of me I couldn't.
"No.
"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the pension with those women."
I thought of the irony of it.
If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and put her in the pension with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury being a bit the wiser.
But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.
We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.
Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.
After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made sub-editor of Sport, and thus acquired a settled income. And one morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany: