r up in her garden
chair and attend to her comforts, and then, settled down, she would open
a volume of Tolstoi and courteously signify his dismissal. Jaffery with
a hang-dog expression went with me to the golf-course, where he drove
with prodigious muscular skill, and putted execrably. Had it not been a
question of good taste, to say nothing of human sentiment, I would have
reminded him that the thing he was hitting so violently was only a
little white ball and not poor Adrian's skull. If ever a man was loyal
to a dead friend Jaffery Chayne was loyal to Adrian Boldero. But poor
old Jaffery was being checked in every vital avenue, not by the memory
of the man whom he had known and loved, but by his cynical and
masquerading ghost. It is not given to me, thank God! to know from
direct speech what Jaffery thought of Adrian--for Jaffery is too
splendid a fellow to have ever said a word in depreciation of his once
living friend and afterward dead rival; but both I, who do not aspire to
these Quixotic heights and only, with masculine power of generalisation,
deduce results from a quiet eye's harvest of mundane phenomena, and
Barbara, whose rapier intuition penetrates the core of spiritual things,
could, with little difficulty, divine the passionate struggle between
love and hatred, between loyalty and tenderness, between desire and duty
that took place in the soul of this chivalrous yet primitive and vastly
appetited gentleman.

You may think I am trying to present Jaffery as a hero of romance. I am
not. I am merely trying to put before you, in my imperfect way, a
barbarian at war with civilised instincts; a lusty son of Pantagruel
forced into the incongruous role of Sir Galahad. . . . During the term
of his punishment he behaved in a bearish and most unheroic manner. At
last, however, Doria forgave him, and, smiling on him once more,
permitted him to read Tolstoi aloud to her. Whereupon he mended his
manners.

The day following this reconciliation was a Sunday. We had invited
Liosha (as we constantly did) to lunch and dine. She usually arrived by
an early train in the forenoon and returned by the late train at night.
But on Saturday evening, she asked Barbara, over the telephone, for
permission to bring a friend, a gentleman staying in the boarding house,
the happy possessor of a car, who would motor her down. His name was
Fendihook. Barbara replied that she would be delighted to see Liosha's
friend, and of course came bac