"I haven't seen her--all this time--_because_
I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."

"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"

"How do I know? How do I know anything?--It's you who don't know. You
don't know anything at all."

* * * * *

Well, he went--like that--without telling any of them.

I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat
to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur--he, as he pointed out to me,
superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise
there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal
doesn't funk it and I do."

And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious
joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's
grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged
appropriate, we parted.

Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after
me, Furny. You won't catch me _this_ time."

XIII

Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that
had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I
gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at
Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.

But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as
well have told her that he was dead.

Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.

"You _knew_ this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told
me?"

I said I had only known it last night--how could I have told her?

She persisted. "You _knew_--at what time last night?"

I hesitated and she drove it home.

"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."

I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was
too late to wire.

"Do you suppose," she said, "--if I'd known--that I should be _here_?"

I couldn't tell her--she was so white under her wound and the shock of
it--I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that
she would be with him.

And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I
could have caught that boat."

"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."

"It doesn't matter what he wants--or thinks he wants--I'm going.

"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've
gained by trying to stop me."

I