nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some
supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he
would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed
if I had told him it was necessary.

I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He
submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and
omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the
most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he
recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had
nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife
(who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro
before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had
confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The
poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had
come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There
were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)

I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact
that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by
himself.

We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend
after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but
I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his
lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he
had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came,
if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the
gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a
thing of feeble _cliches_ that might have passed in any drawing-room.

We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and
that I didn't.

The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from
Canterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you come
Canterbury at once. Viola."

Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it
was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble
was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his
departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England;
the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did
not. It was I and not Jevons who wa