You see?  We had been talking about different things.  My mind had been fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it.  Hers had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an event to her altogether beautiful—­the destruction of the cowardice that would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her soul dared.

This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.

That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had simply never occurred to her.  It couldn’t.  She didn’t know and wouldn’t have believed it possible that people did these things.

What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy’s saying that about keeping the other places till they could see them together.  He meant, you see, till they were married.  It brought it so home to her.  And it brought home to her what it meant to him.  Because he couldn’t afford to marry yet for ages.

If she’d gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him.  And it would have been so cruel to herself, too.

Then she told me what they had done together.  Heavens!  How she must have trusted him.  She joined him here in Bruges.  And they’d gone to Antwerp, then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their traces, a day behind them at each city.)

And it had all been so beautiful.  She simply couldn’t tell me how beautiful it had been.  It was as if she had never seen anything properly before.

Jimmy had made her see things.  “I can understand,” she said, “what he meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him.  It hurts me.”

I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn’t there.

She looked up and smiled.  “He isn’t here now, Furny.”

I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the boat.  I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover, and to contrive so that she shouldn’t be seen arriving by the up platform at Canterbury.

“Oh,” she said.  “You have to take some risk!”

We were on the gangway, saying good-bye.  And from the boat’s gunwale she flung me buoyantly, “If I’m caught I’ll say it was you I went off with.  They won’t mind that half so much.”

I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I had left him in his hotel.  I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding Withers there and confusing him in his ideas.  We didn’t find him.  He had gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.

It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, “By the way, Miss Thesiger says you didn’t make her come.  She proposed coming herself.”

He flushed furiously and denied it.  “Of course I made her come.  It wasn’t likely she’d propose a thing like that.”