I said to Barbara:  “She’s making a besotted idiot of the man.”

Barbara professed rare agreement.  But . . . the woman’s point of view. . . .

“I don’t worry about him,” she said.  “It’s of her I’m thinking.  When she has turned him into the idiot—­”

“She’ll adore him all the more,” I interrupted.

“But when she finds out the idiot she has made?”

“No woman has ever done that since the world began,” said I.  “The unwavering love of woman for her home-made idiot is her sole consistency.”

Barbara with much puckering of brow sought for argument, but found none, the proposition being incontrovertible.  She mused for a while and then, quickly, a smile replaced the frown.

“I suppose that is why I go on loving you, Hilary dear,” she said sweetly.

I turned upon her, with my hand, as it were, on the floodgates of a torrent of eloquence; but with her silvery mocking laugh she vanished from the apartment.  She did.  The old-fashioned high-falutin’ phrase is the best description I can give of the elusive uncapturable nature of this wife of mine.  It is a pity that she has so little to do with the story of Jaffery which I am trying to relate, for I should like to make her the heroine.  You see, I know her so well, or imagine I do, which comes to the same thing, and I should love to present you with a solution, of this perplexing, exasperating, adorable, high-souled conundrum that is Barbara Freeth.  But she, like myself, is but a raisonneur in the drama, and so, reluctantly, I must keep her in the background. Paullo majora canamus.  Let us come to the horses.

All this, time we had not lost sight of Liosha.  As deputies for the absent trustee we received periodical reports from the admirable Mrs. Considine, and entertained both ladies for an occasional week-end.  On the whole, her demeanour in the Queen’s Gate boarding-house was satisfactory.  At first trouble arose over a young curly haired Swiss waiter who had won her sympathy in the matter of a broken heart.  She had entered the dining-room when he was laying the table and discovered him watering the knives and forks with tears.  Unaccustomed to see men weep, she enquired the cause.  He dried his eyes with a napkin and told a woeful tale of a faithless love in Neuchatel, a widow plump and well-to-do.  He had looked forward to marry her at the end of the year, and to pass an unruffled life in the snugness of the delicatessen shop which she conducted with such skill; but now alas, she had announced her engagement to another, and his dream of bliss among the chitterlings and liver-sausages was shattered.  Herr Gott! what was he to do?  Liosha counselled immediate return to Neuchatel and assassination of his rival.  To kill another man for her was the surest way to a woman’s heart.  The waiter approved the scheme, but lacked the courage—­also the money to go to Neuchatel.  Liosha, espousing his