“I’d like to hurt him.  Why can’t he keep his infernal tongue quiet?”

He proceeded to wither up the soul of Arbuthnot with awful anathema.  Then in his infantile way he shouted:  “I didn’t want any of you to know anything about it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I didn’t.”

“But I suppose you wanted to go to Persia?”

He paused in his lumbering walk about the little room and collecting a litter of books and papers and a hat or two and a legging from a sofa, pitched it into a corner.

“Here.  Sit down.”

I had been warming my back at the fire hitherto and surveying the half-formal, half-unkempt sitting-room.  It was by no means the comfortable home from Harrod’s Stores that Barbara had prescribed; and he had not attempted to furnish it in slap-up style with the heads of game and skins and modern weapons which lay in the London Repository.  It was the impersonal abode of the male bird of passage.

“Sit down,” said he, “and have a drink.”

I declined, alleging the fact that a philosophically minded country gentleman of domestic habits does not require alcohol at half past eleven in the morning, except under the stress of peculiar circumstances.

“I’m going to have one anyway!”

He disappeared and presently reentered with a battered two-handled silver quart pot bearing defaced arms and inscription, a rowing trophy of Cambridge days, which he always carried about with him on no matter what lightly equipped expedition—­it is always a matter of regret to me that Jaffery, as I have mentioned before, missed his seat in the Cambridge boat; but when one despoils a Proctor of his square cap and it is found the central feature of one’s rooms beneath a glass shade such as used to protect wax flowers from the dust, what can one expect from the priggish judgment of university authority?—­he reentered, with this vessel full of beer.  He nodded, drank a huge draught and wiped his moustache with his hand.

“Better have some.  I’ve got a cask in the bedroom.”

“Good God!” said I, aghast.  “What else do you keep there?  A side of bacon and a Limburger cheese and Bombay duck?”

Now just imagine a civilised gentleman keeping a cask of beer in his bedroom.

Jaffery laughed and took another swig and called me a long, lean, puny-gutted insect; which was not polite, but I was glad to hear the deep “Ho! ho! ho!” that followed his vituperation.

“All the same,” said I, reclining on the cleared sofa and lighting a cigarette, “I should like to know why you missed one of the chances of your life in not going out to Persia.”

He stood, for a moment or two, scrabbling in whisker and beard; and, turning over in his mind, I suppose, that Barbara was my wife, and Susan my child, and I myself an inconsiderable human not evilly disposed towards him, he apparently decided not to annihilate me.