“Doria,” said I.

“I think it’s Adrian,” said Jaffery.

“I think,” said Barbara, “it’s that silly old woman, Adrian’s mother.  Either of the others would have said something definite.  Ah!” she smote her knee with her small hand, “I hate people with spinal marrow and no backbone to hold it!”

We tore through Maidenhead at a terrific pace, the Christmas traffic in the town clearing magically before us.  Sometimes a car on an errand of life or death is recognised, given way to, like a fire engine.

“What makes you so dead sure something’s happened to Adrian?” Jaffery asked me as we thundered through the railway arch.

Then I remembered.  I had told him little or nothing of my fears.  Ever since I learned that Adrian was putting the finishing touches to his novel, I had dismissed them from my mind.  Such accounts as I had given of Adrian had been in a jocularly satirical vein.  I had mentioned his pontifical attitude, the magnification of his office, his bombastic rhetoric over the Higher Life and the Inspiration of the Snows, and, all that being part and parcel of our old Adrian, we had laughed.  Six months before I would have told Jaffery quite a different story.  But now that Adrian had practically won through, what was the good of reviving the memory of ghastly apprehensions?

“Tell me,” said Jaffery.  “There’s something behind all this.”

I told him.  It took some time.  We sped through Slough and Hounslow, and past the desolate winter fields.  The grey air was as heavy as our hearts.

“In plain words,” said Jaffery, “it’s G.P.—­General Paralysis of the Insane.”

“That’s what I fear,” said I.

“And you?” He turned to Barbara.

“I too.  Hilary has told you the truth.”

“But Doria!  Good God!  Doria!  It will kill her!”

Barbara put her little gloved fingers on Jaffery’s great raw hand.  Only at weddings or at the North Pole would Jaffery wear gloves.

“We know nothing about it as yet.  The more we tear ourselves to pieces now, the less able we’ll be to deal with things.”

Through the bottle-neck of Brentford, the most disgraceful main entrance in the world into any great city, with bare room for a criminal double line of tramways blocked by heavy, horse-drawn traffic, an officially organised murder-trap for all save the shrinking pedestrian on the mean, narrow, greasy side-walk, we crawled as fast as we were able.  Then through Chiswick, over Hammersmith Bridge, into the heart of London.  All London to cross.  Never had it seemed longer.  And the great city was smitten by a blight.  It was not a fog, for one could see clearly a hundred yards ahead.  But there was no sky and the air was a queer yellow, almost olive green, in which the main buildings stood out in startling meanness, and the distant ones were providentially obscured.  Though it was but little past noon, all the great shops