One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.

“I think you’re an ungrateful little wretch.  Here has Jaffery sacrificed his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling together Adrian’s unfinished manuscript and making a great success of it, and you treat him as if he were a dog.”

Doria protested.  “I don’t.  I am grateful.  I don’t know what I should do without Jaffery.  But all my gratitude and fondness for Jaffery can’t alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian’s work; and when I hear those very faults in the book praised, I am fit to be tied.”

“Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you’re all by yourself,” said Barbara; “but when you’re with Jaffery try to be sane and civil.”

“I think you’re horrid!” Doria exclaimed, “and if you weren’t the wife of Adrian’s trusted friend, I would never speak to you again.”

“Rubbish!” said Barbara.  “I’m talking to you for your good, and you know it.”

Meanwhile Jaffery lingered on in London, in the cheerless little eyrie in Victoria Street, with no apparent intention of ever leaving it.  Arbuthnot of The Daily Gazette satirically enquiring whether he wanted a job or still yearned for a season in Mayfair he consigned, in his grinning way, to perdition.  Change was the essence of holiday-making, and this was his holiday.  It was many years since he had one.  When he wanted a job he would go round to the office.

“All right,” said Arbuthnot, “and, in the meantime, if you want to keep your hand in by doing a fire or a fashionable wedding, ring us up.”

Whereat Jaffery roared, this being the sort of joke he liked.

The need of a holiday amid the bricks and mortar of Victoria Street may have impressed Arbuthnot, but it did not impress me.  I dismissed the excuse as fantastic.  I tackled him one day, at lunch, at the club, assuming my most sceptical manner.

“Well,” said he, “there’s Doria.  Somebody must look after her.”

“Doria,” said I, “is a young woman, now that she is in sound health, perfectly capable of looking after herself.  And if she does want a man’s advice, she can always turn to me.”

“And there’s Liosha.”

“Liosha,” I remarked judiciously, “is also a young woman capable of looking after herself.  If she isn’t, she has given you very definitely to understand that she’s going to try.  Have you had any more interesting evenings out lately?”

“No,” he growled.  “She’s offended with me because I warned her off that low-down bounder.”

“I think you did your best,” said I, “to make her take up with him.”

He protested.  We argued the point, and I think I got the best of the argument.

“Well, anyhow,” he said with an air of infantile satisfaction, “she can’t marry him.”

“Who’s going to prevent her, if she wants to?”

“The law of England.”  He laughed, mightily pleased.  “The beggar is married already.  I’ve found that out.  He’s got three or four wives in fact—­oh, a dreadful hound—­but only one real one with a wedding ring, and she lives up in the north with a pack of children.”