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, h