,
Barbara's Medusa glare petrified him into a living statue, the crystal
jug of joy poised in his hand.

"Why mayn't I have some, mummy?"

"Because Uncle Jaff's your godfather," said I. "And your mother's
hock-cup is a sinful lust of the flesh. Spare the child and fill up your
own glass."

"Don't you know," said Barbara, "that this is Berkshire, not the
Balkans? We don't intoxicate infants here to make a summer holiday!"

At this rebuke he exchanged winks with my daughter, and refusing a
handed dish of cutlets asked to be allowed to help himself to some cold
beef on the sideboard. The butler's assistance he declined. No Christian
butler could carve for Jaffery Chayne. After a longish absence he
returned to the table with half the joint on his plate. Susan regarded
it wide-eyed.

"Uncle Jaff, are you going to eat all that?" she asked in an audible
whisper.

"Yes, and you too," he roared, "and mummy and daddy and Uncle Adrian, if
I don't get enough to eat!"

"And Aunt Doria?"

Again he reddened--but he turned to Doria and bowed.

"In my quality of ogre only--a _bonne bouche_," said he.

It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan began the
inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some dereliction
with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to speak, hustled
out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology for his Gargantuan
appetite discoursed on the privations of travel in uncivilised lands. A
lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine and a hazelnut for dinner.
We were to fancy the infinite accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he
devoured cold beef and talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof
interest of one who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a
new kind of hippopotamus.

The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due
east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and
swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining
three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of
earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My wife, with the
responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow,
discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I, to whom the quality of
the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and
that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were
matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more