ou must have been afraid, or you wouldn't have gone out to bring her
back."

"Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter. When things got dangerous he
took her back to Bruges and put her in a _pension_ to be safe from him."

He looked up sharply.

"She never told me that--that he took her there to be safe from him."

"I don't suppose she knew. She was as innocent as all that."

"And how do _you_ know?"

"Because he told me so."

I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.

"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."

I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.

He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe
him?"

I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."

I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of
the affair that--as a man of the world--he had found it so hard to
swallow--"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."

He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:

"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"

I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a
village somewhere in Hertfordshire.

And then: "Is he--is he _very_ impossible?"

I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.

He didn't press it.

"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got
to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"

I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.

He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do
you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."

I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah,
who was more than ever determined to beat me.

And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.

* * * * *

The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a
lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I
would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had
demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that
was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a
morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral
Close.

But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against
Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence--even while I
whitewashed him--