ous ogre and our poor little elf to fight out
between themselves whatever battle they had to fight. Perhaps it was
cold-blooded cruelty on our part. But these two had to come to mutual
understanding sooner or later. Why not at once? They had the afternoon
before them. It was pouring with rain. They had nothing else to do. In
order that they should be undisturbed, Barbara had given orders that we
were not at home to visitors. Besides, we were actuated by motives not
entirely altruistic. If I seem to have posed before you as a
noble-minded philanthropist, I have been guilty of careless
misrepresentation. At the best I am but a not unkindly, easy-going man
who loathes being worried. And I (and Barbara even more than myself) had
been greatly worried over our friends' affairs for a considerable
period. We therefore thought that the sooner we were freed from these
worries the better for us both. Deliberately we hardened our hearts
against their joint appeal and left them together in the drawing-room.

"Whew!" said I, as we walked along the corridor. "What's going to
happen?"

"She'll marry him, of course."

"She won't," said I.

"She will. My dear Hilary, they always do."

"If I have any knowledge of feminine character," said I, "that young
woman harbours in her soul a bitter resentment against Jaffery."

"If," she said. "But you haven't."

"All right," said I.

"All right," said Barbara.

We paused at the library door. "What," I asked, "is going to become of
Liosha?"

Barbara sighed. "We're not out of this wood yet."

"And with Liosha on our hands, I don't think we ever shall be."

"I should like to shake Jaffery," said Barbara.

"And I should like," said I, "to kick him."

CHAPTER XXV

So, as I have said, we left those two face to face in the big
drawing-room. The man in an agony of self-reproach, helpless pity and
realised failure; the woman--as it seemed to me, smoking reflectively in
my library armchair, for sleep was impossible--the woman in the calm of
desperation. The man who had performed a thousand chivalrous acts to
shield her from harm, who lavished on her all the devotion and
tenderness of his simple heart; the woman who owed him her life, and,
but for fool accident and her own lack of faith in him, would still be
owing him the twilight happiness of her Fool's Paradise. They had not
met, or exchanged written words, since the early summer day at the St.
John's Wood flat, when he had tol