irst, but that I'm a chap with brains,
and"--he turned over a bundle of press-cuttings--"and 'poetic fancy' and
'master of the human heart' and 'penetrating insight into the soul of
things' and 'uncanny knowledge of the complexities of woman's nature.'
Ho! ho! ho! That's me, Jaff Chayne, whom you've disregarded all these
years. Look at it in black and white: 'uncanny knowledge of the
complexities of a woman's nature'! Ho! ho! ho! And it's selling like
blazes."

It did not enter his honest head to envy the dead man his fresh
ill-gotten fame. He accepted the success in the large simplicity of
spirit that had enabled him to conceive and write the book. His poorer
human thoughts and emotions centred in the hope that now Adrian's
restless ghost would be laid forever and that for Doria there would open
a new life in which, with the past behind her, she could find a glory in
the sun and an influence in the stars, and a spark in her own bosom
responsive to his devotion. For the tumultuous moment, however, when
Adrian's name was on all men's tongues, and before all men's eyes, the
ghost walked in triumphant verisimilitude of life. At all the meetings
of Jaffery and Doria, he was there smiling beneath his laurels, whenever
he was evoked; and he was evoked continuously. Either by law of irony or
perhaps for intrinsic merit, the bridges to whose clumsy construction
Jaffery, like an idiot, had confessed, had been picked out by many
reviewers as typical instances of Adrian Boldero's new style. Such
blunders were flies in Doria's healing ointment. She alluded to the
reviewers in disdainful terms. How dared editors employ men to write on
Adrian's work who were unable to distinguish between it and that of
Jaffery Chayne?

One day, when she talked like this, Barbara lost her temper.

"I think you're an ungrateful little wretch. Here has Jaffery sacrificed
his work for three months and devoted himself to pulling together
Adrian's unfinished manuscript and making a great success of it, and you
treat him as if he were a dog."

Doria protested. "I don't. I _am_ grateful. I don't know what I should
do without Jaffery. But all my gratitude and fondness for Jaffery can't
alter the fact that he has spoiled Adrian's work; and when I hear those
very faults in the book praised, I am fit to be tied."

"Well, go crazy and bite the furniture when you're all by yourself,"
said Barbara; "but when you're with Jaffery try to be sane and civil."

"I