He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.

I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.

"I see," he said. "He's told you."

I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.

"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."

I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.

"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm
here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."

He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the
thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I
had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that
this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost
intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his
calmness was the measure of his trust in me.

"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."

I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having
brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over
the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.

He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than--it isn't