n how Miss Graves could write such
a book; the answer is that Richard Dehan wrote it.

=iii=

Miss Graves, of whose antecedents and education we already know something,
is a Roman Catholic in faith and a Liberal Unionist in politics. She lives
at The Towers, Beeding, near Bramber, Sussex. Her recreations are
gardening and driving.

But Richard Dehan knows the early history of the Christian Church; he
knows military life, strategy, tactics, types; he knows in a most
extraordinary way the details of Jewish history and religious observances;
he knows perfectly and as a matter of course all about English middle
class life; he knows all sorts of things about the East--Turkey and Arabia
and those countries.

This is a discrepancy which will bear a good deal of accounting for.

Before I try to account for it I will give you a long passage from _The
Just Steward_, describing the visit of Katharine Forbis and her friend to
the house of John Hazel, lately of London and now of Alexandria:

"The negro porter who had opened the door, a huge Ethiopian of ebony
blackness, dressed and turbaned in snow-white linen, salaamed deeply to
the ladies, displaying as he did so a mouthful of teeth as dazzling in
whiteness and sharply-pointed as those of the mosaic dog.

"Then the negro shut the heavy door and locked and bolted it. They heard
the car snort and move away as the heavy bolts scrooped in their ancient
grooves of stone. But, as they glanced back, towards the entrance, the
imperturbable attendant in the black kaftan waved them forward to where
another man, exactly like himself in feature, colouring and costume,
waited as imperturbably on the threshold of a larger hall beyond. On its
right-hand doorpost was affixed a cylinder of metal _repoussee_ with an
oval piece of glass on that something like a human eye. And the big
invisible bees went on humming as industriously and as sleepily as ever:

"'Bz'zz'z!... Bzz'z!... Bzz m'm'm!...'

"Perhaps it was the bees' thick, sleepy droning that made Miss Forbis feel
as though she had previously visited this house in a dream, in which,
though the mosaic dog had certainly figured, together with a negro who had
opened doors, the rows of shoes along the wall, the little creature
tripping at her side, the two dark, ultra-respectable men in black
tarbushes and kaftans had had no place or part. Only John Hazel had bulked
big. He was there, beyond the grave Semitic face of the second Jewish
sec