"All the more dangerous for Liosha to associate with such a villain."

He waved the suggestion aside. No fear of that, said he. It was not Liosha's game. Hers was an Amazonian kind of chastity. Here I agreed with him.

"All the less reason," said I, "for you to stay in London, so as to look after her."

"But I don't like her to be seen about in the fellow's company. She'll get a bad name."

"Look here," said I, "the idea of a vast, hairy chap like you devoting his life to keeping a couple of young widows out of mischief is too preposterous. Try me with something else."

Then, being in good humour, he told me the real reason. He was writing another book.

He was writing another novel and he did not want any one to know. He was getting along famously. He had had the story in his head for a long time. Glad to talk about it; sketched the outline very picturesquely. Perhaps I was more vitally interested in the development of the man Jaffery than in the story. A queer thing had happened. The born novelist had just discovered himself and clamoured for artistic self-expression. He was writing this book just because he could not help it, finding gladness in the mere work, delighting in the mechanics of the thing, and letting himself go in the joy of the narrative. What was going to become of it when written, I did not enquire. It was rather too delicate a matter. Jaffery Chayne could be nothing else than Jaffery Chayne. A new novel published by him would resemble "The Greater Glory" as closely as "Pendennis" resembles "Philip." And then there would be the deuce to pay. If he published it under his own name, he would render himself liable to the charge of having stolen a novel from the dead author of "The Greater Glory," and so complicate this already complicated web of literary theft; and if he threw sufficient dust into the eyes of Doria to enable him to publish under Adrian's name, he would be performing the task of the altruistic bees immortalised by Virgil.

Anyhow, there he was, perfectly happy, pegging away at his novel, looking after Doria, pretending to look after Liosha, and enjoying the society of the few cronies, chiefly adventurous birds of passage like himself, who happened to be passing through London. Being a man of modest needs, save need of mere bulk of simple food, he found his small patrimony and the savings from his professional earnings quite adequate for amenable existence. When he wanted healthy, fresh air he came down to us to see Susan; when he wanted anything else he went to see Doria, which was almost daily.

Doria was living now in the flat surrounded by the Lares and Penates consecrated by Adrian. Now and then for purposes of airing and dusting, she entered the awful room—neither servants nor friends were allowed to cross the threshold; but otherwise it was always locked and the key lay in her jewel case. Adrian was the focus of her being. She put heavy tasks on Jaffery. There was to be a fitting monument on Adrian's grave, over which she kept him busy. In her blind perversity she counted on his cooeperation. It was he who carried through negotiations with an eminent sculptor for a bust of Adrian, which in her will, made about that time, she bequeathed to the nation. She ordered him to see to the inclusion of Adrian in the supplement to the Dictionary of National Biography. . . . And all the time Jaffery obeyed her sovereign behests without a murmur and without a hint that he desired reward for his servitude. But, to those gifted with normal vision, signs were not wanting that he chafed, to put it mildly, under this forced worship of Adrian; and to those who knew Jaffery it was obvious that his one-sided arrangement could not last forever. Doria remained blind, taking it for granted that every one should kiss the feet of her idol and in that act of adoration find august recompense. That the man loved her she was fully aware; she was not devoid of elementary sense; but she accepted it, as she accepted everything else, as her due, and perhaps rather despised Jaffery for his meekness. Why, again, she disregarded what her instinct must have revealed to her of the primitive passions lurking beneath the exterior of her kind and tender ogre, I cannot understand. For one thing, she considered herself his intellectual superior; vanity perhaps blinded her judgment. At all events she did not realise that a change was bound to come in their relations. It came, inevitably.

One day in June they sat together on the balcony of the St. John's Wood flat, in the soft afternoon shadow, both conscious of queer isolation from the world below, and from the strange world masked behind the vast superficies of brick against which they were perched. Jaffery said something about a nest midway on a cliff side overlooking the sea. He also, in bass incoherence, formulated the opinion that in such a nest might he found true happiness. The pretty languor of early summer laughed in the air. Their situation, 'twixt earth and heaven, had a little sensuous charm. Doria replied sentimentally:

"Yes, a little house, covered with clematis, on a ledge of cliff, with the sea-gulls wheeling about it—bringing messages from the sunset lands across the blue, blue sea—" Poor dear! She forgot that sea lit by a westering sun is of no colour at all and that the blue water lies to the east; but no matter; Jaffery, drinking in her words, forgot it likewise. "Away from everything," she continued, "and two people who loved—with a great, great love—"

Her eyes were fixed on the motor omnibuses passing up and down Maida Vale at the end of her road. Her lips were parted—the ripeness of youth and health rendered her adorable. A flush stained her ivory cheek—you will find the exact simile in Virgil. She was too desirable for Jaffery's self-control. He bent forward in his chair—they were sitting face to face, so that he had his back to the motor omnibuses—and put his great hand on her knee.

"Why not we two?"

It was silly, sentimental, schoolboyish—what you please; but every man's first declaration of love is bathos—the zenith of his passion connoting perhaps the nadir of his intelligence. Anyhow the declaration was made, without shadow of mistake.

Doria switched her knee away sharply, as her vision of sunset and gulls and blue sea and a clematis-covered house vanished from before her eyes, and she found herself on her balcony with Jaff Chayne.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"You know very well what I mean."

He rose like a leviathan and made a step towards her. The three-foot balustrade of the balcony seemed to come to his ankles. She put out a hand.

"Oh, don't do that, Jaff. You might fall over. It makes me so nervous."

He checked himself and stood up quite straight. Again he felt as if she had dealt him a slap in the face.

"You know very well what I mean," he repeated. "I love you and I want you and I'll never be happy till I get you."

She looked away from him and lifted her slender shoulders.

"Why spoil things by talking of the impossible?"

"The word has no meaning. Doesn't exist," said Jaffery.

"It exists very much indeed," she returned, with a quick upward glance.

"Not with an obstinate devil like me."

He leaned against the low balustrade. She rose.

"You'll drive me into hysterics," she cried and fled to the drawing-room.

He followed, impatiently. "I'm not such an ass as to fall off a footling balcony. What do you take me for?"

"I take you for Adrian's friend," she said, very erect, brave elf facing horrible ogre—and, either by chance or design, her hand touched and held the tip of a great silver-framed photograph of her late husband.

"I think I've proved it," said Jaffery.

"Are you proving it now? What value can you attach to Adrian's memory when you say such things to me?"

"I'm saying to you what every honest man has the right to say to the free woman he loves."

"But I'm not a free woman. I'm bound to Adrian."

"You can't be bound to him forever and ever."

"I am. That's why it's shameful and dishonourable of you,"—his blue eyes flashed dangerously and he clenched his hands, but heedless she went on—"yes, mean and base and despicable of you to wish to betray him. Adrian—"

"Oh, don't talk drivel. It makes me sick. Leave Adrian alone and listen to a living man," he shouted, all the pent-up intellectual disgusts and sex-jealousies bursting out in a mad gush. "A real live man who would walk through Hell for you!" He caught her frail body in his great grasp, and she vibrated like a bit of wire caught up by a dynamo. "My love for you has nothing whatever to do with Adrian. I've been as loyal to him as one man can be to another, living and dead. By God, I have! Ask Hilary and Barbara. But I want you. I've wanted you since the first moment I set eyes on you. You've got into my blood. You're going to love me. You're going to marry me, Adrian or no Adrian."

He bent over her and she met the passion in his eyes bravely. She did not lack courage. And her eyes were hard and her lips were white and her face was pinched into a marble statuette of hate. And unconscious that his grip was giving her physical pain he continued:

"I've waited for you. I've waited for you from the moment I heard you were engaged to the other man. And I'll go on waiting. But, by God!"—and, not knowing what he did, he shook her backwards and forwards—"I'll not go on waiting for ever. You—you little bit of mystery—you little bit of eternity—you—you—ah!"

With a great gesture he released her. But the poor ogre had not counted on his strength. His unwitting violence sent her spinning, and she fell, knocking her head against a sofa. He uttered a gasp of horror and in an instant lifted her and laid her on the sofa, and on his knees beside her, with remorse oversurging his passion, behaved like a penitent fool, accusing himself of all the unforgivable savageries ever practised by barbaric male. Doria, who was not hurt in the least, sat up and pointed to the door.

"Go!" she said. "Go. You're nothing but a brute."

Jaffery rose from his knees and regarded her in the hebetude of reaction.

"I suppose I am, Doria, but it's my way of loving you."

She still pointed. "Go," she said tonelessly. "I can't turn you out, but if Adrian was alive—Ha! ha! ha!—" she laughed with a touch of hysteria. "How do you dare, you barren rascal—how do you dare to think you can take the place of a man like Adrian?"



The whip of her tongue lashed him to sudden fury. He picked her up bodily and held her in spite of struggles, just as you or I would hold a cat or a rabbit.

"You little fool," said he, "don't you know the difference between a man and a—"

Realisation of the tragedy struck him as a spent bullet might have struck him on the side of the head. He turned white.

"All right," said he in a changed voice. "Easy on. I'm not going to hurt you."

He deposited her gently on the sofa and strode out of the room.



CHAPTER XVII

If the old song be true which says that it is not so much the lover who woos as the lover's way of wooing, Jaffery seemed to have thrown away his chances by adopting a very unfortunate way indeed. Doria proved to Barbara, urgently summoned to a bed of prostration and nervous collapse, that she would never set eyes again upon the unqualifiable savage by whom her holiest sentiments had been outraged and her person disgracefully mishandled. She poured out a blood-curdling story into semi-sympathetic ears. Barbara made short work of her contention that Jaffery ought to have respected her as he would have respected the wife of a living friend, characterising it as morbid and indecent nonsense; and with regard to the physical violence she declared that it would have served her right had he smacked her.

"If you want to be faithful to the memory of your first husband, be faithful," she said. "No one can prevent you. And if a good man comes along with an honourable proposal of marriage, tell him in an honourable way why you can't marry him. But don't accept for months all a man has to give, and then, when he tells you what you've known perfectly well all along, treat him as if he were making shameful proposals to you—especially a man like Jaffery; I have no patience with you."

Doria wept. No one understood her. No one understood Adrian. No one understood the bond there was between them. Of that she was aware. But when it came to being brutally assaulted by Jaffery Chayne, she really thought Barbara would sympathise. Wherefore Barbara, rather angry at being brought up to London on a needless errand, involving loss of dinner and upset of household arrangements, administered a sleeping-draught and bade her wake in the morning in a less idiotic frame of mind.

"Perhaps I behaved like a cat," Barbara said to me later—to "behave like a cat" is her way of signifying a display of the vilest phases of feminine nature—"but I couldn't help it. She didn't talk a great deal of sense. It isn't as if I had never warned her about the way she has been treating Jaffery. I have, heaps of times. And as for Adrian—I'm sick of his name—and if I am, what must poor old Jaff be?"

This she said during a private discussion that night on the whole situation. I say the whole situation, because, when she returned to Northlands, she found there a haggard ogre who for the first time in his life had eaten a canary's share of an excellent dinner, imploring me to tell him whether he should enlist for a soldier, or commit suicide, or lie prone on Doria's doormat until it should please her to come out and trample on him. He seemed rather surprised—indeed a trifle hurt—that neither of us called him a Satyr. How could we take his part and not Doria's—especially now that Barbara had come from the bedside of the scandalously entreated lady? He boomed and bellowed about the drawing-room, recapitulating the whole story.

"But, my good friend," I remonstrated, "by the showing of both of you, she taunted you and insulted you all ends up. You—'a barren rascal'—you? Good God!"

He flung out a deprecatory hand. What did it matter? We must take this from her point of view. He oughtn't to have laid hands on her. He oughtn't to have spoken to her at all. She was right. He was a savage unfit for the society of any woman outside a wigwam.

"Oh, you make me tired," cried Barbara, at last. "I'm going to bed. Hilary, give him a strait-waistcoat. He's a lunatic."

The household resources not including a strait-waistcoat, I could not exactly obey her, but as he had come down luggageless, and with a large disregard of the hours of homeward trains, I lent him a suit of my meagre pyjamas, which must have served the same purpose.

He left the next morning. Heedless of advice he called on Doria and was denied admittance. He wrote. His letter was returned unopened. He passed a miserable week, unable to work, at a loose end in London during the height of the season. In despair he went to The Daily Gazette office and proclaimed himself ready for a job. But for the moment the earth was fairly calm and the management could find no field for Jaffery's special activities. Arbuthnot again offered him reports of fires and fashionable weddings, but this time Jaffery did not enjoy the fine humour of the proposal. He blistered Arbuthnot with abuse, swung from the newspaper office, and barged mightily down Fleet Street, a disturber of traffic. Then he came down to Northlands for a while, where, for want of something to do, he hired himself out to my gardener and dug up most of the kitchen garden. His usual occupation of romping with Susan was gone, for she lay abed with some childish ailment which Barbara feared might turn into German measles. So when he was not perspiring over a spade or eating or sleeping he wandered about the place in his most restless mood. At nights he ransacked my library for gazetteers and atlases wherein he searched for abominable places likely to afford the explorer the most horrible life and the bleakest possible death. He was toying with the idea of making a jaunt on his own account to Thibet, when a merciful Providence gave him something definite to think about.

It was Saturday morning. I was shaving peacefully in my dressing-room when Jaffery, after thunderously demanding admittance, rushed in, clad in bath gown and slippers, flourishing a letter.

"Read that."

I recognised Liosha's handwriting. I read:

"Dear Jaff Chayne,

"As you are my Trustee, I guess I ought to tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to marry Ras Fendihook—"

I looked up. "But you told me the man was married already."

"He is. Read on."

"We are going to be married at once. We are going to be married at Havre in France. Ras says that because I am a widow and an Albanian it would be an awful trouble for me to get married in England, and I would have to give up half my money to Government. But in France, owing to different laws, I can get married without any fuss at all. I don't understand it, but Ras has consulted a lawyer, so it's all right. I suppose when I am married you won't be my trustee any more. So, dear Jaff Chayne, I must say good-bye and thank you for all your great kindness to me. I am sorry you and Barbara and Hilary don't like Ras, which his real name really is Erasmus, but you will when you know him better.

"Yours affectionately,

"LIOSHA PRESCOTT."

The amazing epistle took my breath away.

"Of all the infernal scoundrels!" I cried.

"There's going to be trouble," said Jaffery, and his look signified that it was he who intended to cause it.

"But why Havre of all places in the world?" said I.

"I suppose it's the only one he knows," replied Jaffery. "He must have once gone to Paris by that route. It's the cheapest."

I glanced through the letter again, and I felt a warm gush of pity for our poor deluded Liosha.

"We must get her out of this."

"Going to," said Jaffery. "Let us have in Barbara at once."

I opened the communicating door and threw the letter into the room where she was dressing. After a moment or two she appeared in cap and peignoir, and the three of us in dressing-gowns, I with lather crinkling over one-half of my face, held first an indignation meeting, and then a council of war.

"I never dreamed the brute would do this," said Jaffery. "He couldn't offer her marriage in the ordinary way without committing bigamy, and I know she wouldn't consent to any other arrangement; so he has invented this poisonous plot to get her out of England."

"And probably go through some fool form of ceremony," said Barbara.

"But how can she be such a thundering idiot as to swallow it?" asked Jaffery.

I was going to remark that women would believe anything, but Barbara's eye was upon me. Yet Liosha's unfamiliarity with the laws and formalities of English marriage was natural, considering the fact that, not so very long before, she was placidly prepared to be sold to a young Albanian cutthroat who met his death through coming to haggle over her price. I myself had found unworthy amusement in telling her wild fables of English life. Her ignorance in many ways was abysmal. Once having seen a photograph in the papers of the King in a bowler-hat she expressed her disappointment that he wore no insignia of royalty; and when I consoled her by saying that, by Act of Parliament, the King was obliged to wear his crown so many hours a day and therefore wore it always at breakfast, lunch and dinner in Buckingham Palace, she accepted my assurance with the credulity of a child of four. And when Barbara rebuked me for taking advantage of her innocence, she was very angry indeed. How was she to know when and where not to believe me?

"She is fresh and ingenuous enough," said I, "to swallow any kind of plausible story. And her ingenuousness in writing you a full account of it is a proof."

"She has given the whole show away," said Jaffery. He smiled. "If Fendihook knew, he would be as sick as a dog."

"And the poor dear is so honest and truthful," said Barbara. "She thought she was doing the honourable thing in letting you know."

"No doubt modelling herself on Mrs. Jupp, late Considine," said I.

"Who let us know at the last minute," said Barbara with a quick knitting of the brow.

"Precisely," said I.

"Good Lord!" cried Jaffery. "Do you think she's gone off with the fellow already?"

"You had better ring up Queen's Gate and find out."

He rushed from the room. I hastily finished shaving, while Barbara discoursed to me on the neglect of our duties with regard to Liosha.

Presently Jaffery burst in like a rhinoceros.

"She's gone! She went on Thursday. And this is Saturday. Fendihook left last Sunday. Evidently she has joined him."

We regarded each other in dismay.

"They're in Havre by now," said Barbara.

"I'm not so sure," said Jaffery, sweeping his beard from moustache downward. This I knew to be a sign of satisfaction. When he was puzzled he scrabbled at the whisker. "I'm not so sure. Why should he leave the boarding-house on Sunday? I'll tell you. Because his London engagement was over and he had to put in a week's engagement at some provincial music-hall. Theatrical folks always travel on Sunday. If he was still working in London and wanted to shift his lodgings he wouldn't have chosen Sunday. We can easily see by the advertisements in the morning paper. His London engagement was at the Atrium."

"I've got the Daily Telegraph here," said Barbara.

She fetched it from her room, in the earthquake-stricken condition to which she, as usual, had reduced it, and after earnest search among the ruins disinterred the theatrical advertisement page. The attractions at the Atrium were set out fully; but the name of Ras Fendihook did not appear.

"I'm right," said Jaffery. "The brute's not in town. Now where did she write from?" He fished the envelope from his bath-gown pocket. "Postmark, 'London, S.W., 5.45 p.m.' Posted yesterday afternoon. So she's in London." He glanced at the letter, which was written on her own note-paper headed with the Queen's Gate address, and then held it up before us. "See anything queer about this?"

We looked and saw that it was dated "Thursday."

"There's something fishy," said he. "Can I have the car?"

"Of course."

"I'm going to run 'em both to earth. I want Barbara to come along. I can tackle men right enough, but when it comes to women, I seem to be a bit of an ass. Besides—you'll come, won't you?"

"With pleasure, if I can get back early this afternoon."

"Early this afternoon? Why, my dear child, I want you to be prepared to come to Havre—all over France, if necessary."

"You've got rather a nerve," said I, taken aback by the vast coolness of the proposal.

"I have," said he curtly. "I make my living by it."

"I'd come like a shot," said Barbara, "but I can't leave Susan."

"Oh, blazes!" said Jaffery. "I forgot about that. Of course you can't." He turned to me. "Then Hilary'll come."

"Where?" I asked, stupidly.

"Wherever I take you."

"But, my dear fellow—" I remonstrated.

He cut me short. "Send him to his bath, Barbara dear, and pack his bag, and see that he's ready to start at ten sharp."

He strode out of the door. I caught him up in the corridor.

"Why the deuce," I cried, "can't you do your manhunting by yourself?"

"There are two of 'em and you may come in useful." He faced me and I met the cold steel in his eyes. "If you would rather not help me to save a woman we're both fond of from destruction, I can find somebody else."

"Of course I'll come," said I.

"Good," said he. "Ask Barbara to order a devil of a breakfast."

He marched away, looking in his bath-gown like twenty Roman heroes rolled into one, quite a different Jaffery from the noisy, bellowing fellow to whom I had been accustomed. He spoke in the normal tones of the ordinary human, very coldly and incisively.

I rejoined Barbara. "My dear," said I, "what have we done that we should be dragged into all these acute discomforts of other people's lives?"

She put her hand on my shoulder. "Perhaps, my dear boy, it's just because we've done nothing—nothing otherwise to justify our existence. We're too selfishly, sluggishly happy, you and I and Susan. If we didn't take a share of other people's troubles we should die of congestion of the soul."

I kissed her to show that I understood my rare Barbara of the steady vision. But all the same I fretted at having to start off at a moment's notice for anywhere—perhaps Havre, perhaps Marseilles, perhaps Singapore with its horrible damp climate, which wouldn't suit me—anywhere that tough and discomfort-loving Jaffery might choose to ordain. And I was getting on so nicely with my translation of Firdusi. . . .

"Don't forget," said I, departing bathwards, "to tell Franklin to put in an Arctic sleeping-bag and a solar topee."

* * * * *

We drove first to the house in Queen's Gate and interviewed Mrs. Jardine, a pretentious woman with gold earrings and elaborately done black hair, who seemed to resent our examination as though we were calling in question the moral character of her establishment. She did not know where Mr. Fendihook and Mrs. Prescott had gone. She was not in the habit of putting such enquiries to her guests.

"But one or other may have mentioned it casually," said I.

"Mr. Fendihook went away on Sunday and Mrs. Prescott on Thursday. It was not my business to associate the two departures in any way."

By pressing the various points we learned that Fendihook was an old client of the house. During Mrs. Considine's residence he had been touring in America. It had been his habit to go and come without much ceremonial. As for Liosha, she had given up her rooms, paid her bill and departed with her trunks.

"When did she give notice to leave you?"

"I knew nothing of her intentions till Thursday morning. Then she came with her hat on and asked for her bill and said her things were packed and ready to be brought downstairs."

"What address did she give to the cabman?"

Mrs. Jardine did not know. She rang for the luggage porter. Jaffery repeated his question.

"Westminster Abbey, sir," answered the man.

I laughed. It seemed rather comic. But every one else regarded it as the most natural thing in the world. Jaffery frowned on me.

"I see nothing to laugh at. She was obeying instructions—covering up her tracks. When she got to Westminster she told the driver to cross the bridge—and what railway station is the other end of the bridge?"

"Waterloo," said I.

"And from Waterloo the train goes to Southampton, and from Southampton the boat leaves for Havre. There's nothing funny, believe me."

I said no more.

The porter was dismissed. Jaffery drew the letter from his pocket.

"On the other hand she was in London yesterday afternoon in this district, for here is the 5:45 postmark."

"Oh, I posted that letter," said Mrs. Jardine.

"You?" cried Jaffery. He slapped his thigh. "I said there was something fishy about it."

"There was nothing fishy, as you call it, at all, Mr. Chayne, and I'm surprised at your casting such an aspersion on my character. I had a short letter from Mrs. Prescott yesterday enclosing four other letters which she asked me to stamp and post, as I owed her fourpence change on her bill."

"Where did she write from?" Jaffery asked eagerly.

"Nowhere in particular," said the provoking lady.

"But the postmark on the envelope."

She had not looked at the postmark and the envelope had been destroyed.

"Then where is she?" I asked.

"At Southampton, you idiot," said Jaffery. "Let us get there at once."

So after a visit to my bankers—for I am not the kind of person to set out for Santa Fe de Bogota with twopence halfpenny in my pocket—and after a hasty lunch at a restaurant, much to Jaffery's impatient disgust—"Why the dickens," cried he, "did I order a big breakfast if we're to fool about wasting time over lunch?"—but as I explained, if I don't have regular meals, I get a headache—and after having made other sane preparations for a journey, including the purchase of a toothbrush, an indispensable toilet adjunct, which Franklin, admirable fellow that he is, invariably forgets to put into my case, we started for Southampton. And along the jolly Portsmouth Road we went, through Guildford, along the Hog's Back, over the Surrey Downs rolling warm in the sunshine, through Farnham, through grey, dreamy Winchester, past St. Cross, with its old-world almshouse, through Otterbourne and up the hill and down to Southampton, seventy-eight miles, in two hours and a quarter. Jaffery drove.

We began our search. First we examined the playbills at the various places of entertainment. Ras Fendihook was not playing in Southampton. We went round the hotels, the South-Western, the Royal, the Star, the Dolphin, the Polygon—and found no trace of the runaways. Jaffery interviewed officials at the stations and docks, dapper gentlemen with the air of diplomatists, tremendous fellows in uniform, policemen, porters, with all of whom he seemed to be on terms of familiar acquaintance; but none of them could trace or remember such a couple having crossed by the midnight boats of Thursday or Friday. Nor were their names down on the list of those who had secured berths in advance for this Saturday night.

"You're rather at fault," said I, rather maliciously, not displeased at my masterful friend's failure.

"Not a bit," said he. "Fendihook's leaving on Sunday certainly means that he was starting to fulfill a provincial engagement on Monday. If it was a week's engagement, he crosses to-night. We've only to wait and catch them. If it was a three nights' engagement, which is possible, he and Liosha crossed on Thursday night. In that case we'll cross ourselves and track them down."

"Even if we have to go over the Andes and far away," I murmured.

"Even so," said he. "Now listen. If he's had a week's engagement he must be finishing to-night. In order to catch the boat he must be working in the neighbourhood. Savvy? The only possible place besides this is Portsmouth. We'll run over to Portsmouth, only seventeen miles."

"All right," said I, with a wistful look back at my peaceful, comfortable home, "let us go to Portsmouth. I'll resign myself to dine at Portsmouth. But supposing he isn't there?" I asked, as the car drove off.

"Then he went to Havre on Thursday."

"But suppose he's at Birmingham. He would then take to-morrow night's boat."

"There isn't one on Sundays."

"Then Monday night's boat."

"Well, if he does, won't we be there on Tuesday morning to meet him on the quay? Lord!" he laughed, and brought his huge grip down on my leg above the knee, thereby causing me physical agony, "I should like to take you on an expedition. It would do you a thundering lot of good."

We arrived at Portsmouth, where we conducted the same kind of enquiries as at Southampton. Neither there nor at adjoining Southsea could we find a sign of the Variety Star, Ras Fendihook, and still less of the obscure Liosha. We dined at a Southsea hotel. We dined very well. On that I insisted—without much expenditure of nervous force. Jaffery rails at me for a Sybarite and what not, but I have never seen him refuse viands on account of succulency or wine on account of flavour. We had a quart of excellent champagne, a pint of decent port and a good cigar, and we felt that the gods were good. That is how I like to feel. I felt it so gratefully that when Jaffery suggested it was time to start back to Southampton in order to waylay the London train at the docks, on the off-chance of our fugitives having come down by it, and to catch the Havre boat ourselves, I had not a weary word to say. I cheerfully contemplated the prospect of a night's voyage to Havre. And as Jaffery (also humanised by good cheer) had been entertaining me with juicy stories of China and other mythical lands, I felt equal to any dare-devil adventure.

We went back to Southampton and collected our luggage at the South-Western Hotel—the hotel porter in charge thereof. Our uncertainty as to whether we would cross or not horribly disturbed his dull brain. Ten shillings and Jaffery's peremptory order to stick to his side and obey him slavishly took the place of intellectual workings. It was nearly midnight. We walked through the docks, a background of darkness, a foreground of confusing lights amid which shone vivid illuminated placards before the brightly lit steamers—"St. Malo"—"Cherbourg"—"Jersey"—"Havre." At the quiet gangway of the Havre boat we waited. The porter deposited our bags on the quay and stood patiently expectant like a dog who lays a stick at its master's feet.

One London train came in. The carriage doors opened and a myriad ants swarmed to the various boats. At the Havre boat I took the fore, he the aft gangway. Thousands passed over, men and women, vague human forms encumbered with queer projecting excrescences of impedimenta. They all seemed alike—just a herd of Britons, impelled by irrational instinct, like the fate-driven lemmings of Norway, to cross the sea. And all around, weird in the conflicting lights, hurried gnome-like figures mountainously laden, and in the confusion of sounds could be heard the slither and thud of trunks being conveyed to the hold. At last the tail of the packed wedge disappeared on board and the gangway was clear. I went to the aft gangway to Jaffery and the porter. Neither of us had seen Fendihook or Liosha.

A second train produced results equally barren.

There was nothing to do but carry out the prearranged plan. We went aboard followed by the porter with the luggage.

My method of travel has always been to arrange everything beforehand with meticulous foresight. In the most crowded trains and boats I have thus secured luxurious accommodation. To hear therefore that there were no berths free and that we should have to pass the night either on the windy deck or in the red-plush discomfort of the open saloon caused me not unreasonable dismay. I had to choose and I chose the saloon. Jaffery, of course, chose the raw winds of heaven. All night I did not get a wink of sleep. There was a gross fellow in the next section of red-plush whose snoring drowned the throb of the engines. Stewards long after they had cleared away the remains of supper from the long central table chinked money at the desk and discussed the racing stables of the world with a loudly dressed, red-faced man who, judging from the popping of corks, absorbed whiskies and sodas at the rate of three a minute. I understood then how thoughts of murder arose in the human brain. I devised exquisite means of removing him from a nauseated world. Then there was a lamp which swung backwards and forwards and searched my eyeballs relentlessly, no matter how I covered them.

What was I doing in this awful galley? Why had I left my wife and child and tranquil home? The wind freshened as soon as we got out to sea. There were horrible noises and rattling of tins and swift scurrying of stewards. The ship rolled, which I particularly hate a ship to do. And I was fully dressed and it seemed as if all the tender parts of my body were tied up with twine. What was I doing in this galley?

When I awoke it was broad daylight, and Jaffery was grinning over me and all was deathly still.

"Good God!" I cried, sitting up. "Why has the ship stopped? Is there a fog?"

"Fog?" he boomed. "What are you talking of? We're alongside of Havre."

"What time is it?" I asked.

"Half-past six."

"A Christian gentleman's hour of rising is nine o'clock," said I, lying down again.

He shook me rudely. "Get up," said he.

The sleepless, unshaven, unkempt, twine-bound, self-hating wreck of Hilary Freeth rose to his feet with a groan.

"What a ghastly night!"

"Splendid," said Jaffery, ruddy and fresh. "I must have tramped over twenty miles."

There was an onrush of blue-bloused porters, with metal plate numbers on their arms. One took our baggage. We followed him up the companion onto the deck, and joined the crowd that awaited the releasing gangway. I stood resentful in the sardine pack of humans. The sky was overcast. It was very cold. The universe had an uncared-for, unswept appearance, like a house surprised at dawn, before the housemaids are up. The forced appearance of a well-to-do philosopher at such an hour was nothing less than an outrage. I glared at the immature day. The day glared at me, and turned down its temperature about twenty degrees. From fool thoughtlessness I had not put on my overcoat, which was now far away in charge of the blue-bloused porter. I shivered. Jaffery was behind me. I glanced over my shoulder.

"This is our so-called civilisation," I said bitterly.

At the sound of my voice a tall woman in the rank five feet deep from us turned instinctively round, and Liosha and I looked into each other's eyes.



CHAPTER XVIII

Jaffery caught sight of her at the same time and gripped my arm. Her eyes travelling from mine to his flashed indignant anger. Then she turned haughtily. We tried to edge nearer her, but she was just beyond the convergence of two side currents which pushed us even further away. The gangway was fixed and the movement of the conglomerate mass began. Presently Jaffery again seized my arm.

"There's the brute waiting for her."

And there on the quay, with a flower in his buttonhole and a smile on his fat face, stood Mr. Ras Fendihook. He met her at the foot of the gangway, and obviously told at once of our presence, sought us anxiously with his gaze; then with an air of bravado waved his hat—a hard white felt—and cried out: "Cheer O!" We did not respond. He grinned at us and linking his arm through Liosha's joined the stream of passengers hurrying across the stones to the custom-sheds.

"Stop," Jaffery roared.

They turned, as indeed did everybody within earshot. Fendihook would have gone on, but Liosha very proudly drew him out of the stream into a clear space and, prepared for battle, awaited us. When we had struggled our slow way down and reached the quay she advanced a few steps looking very terrible in her wrath.

"How dare you follow me?"

"Come further away from the crowd," said Jaffery, and with an imperious gesture he swept the three of us along the quay to the stern of the boat, where only a few idle sailor men were lounging, and a sergeant de ville was pacing on his leisurely beat.

"I said you would make a fool of yourself one of these days if I didn't play dragon," he said, at a sudden halt. "I've come to play dragon with a vengeance." He marched on Fendihook. "Now you."

"How d'ye do, old cock? Didn't expect you here," he said jauntily.

"Don't be insolent," replied Jaffery in a remarkably quiet tone. "You know very well why I'm here."

"Jaff Chayne—" Liosha began.

He waved her off. "Take her away, Hilary."

"Come," said I. "I'll tell you all about it."

"He has got to tell me, not you."

"I certainly don't know why the devil you're here," said Fendihook, with sudden nastiness.

"I've come to save this lady from a dirty blackguard."

"How are you going to do it?"

Jaffery addressed Liosha. "You said in your letter—"

"You wrote to him, you crazy fool, after all my instructions?" snarled Fendihook.

"You said in your letter you were going to marry this man."

"Sure," said Liosha.

"And are you going to marry this lady?"

"Certainly."

"Why didn't you marry her in England?"

"I told you in my letter," said Liosha. "See here—we don't want any of your interference." And she planted herself by the side of her abductor, glaring defiance at Jaffery.

Jaffery smiled. "You told her that because she was a widow and an Albanian she would find considerable obstacles in her way and would forfeit half her money to the Government. You lying little skunk!"

The vibration in Jaffery's voice arrested Liosha. She looked swiftly at Fendihook.

"Wasn't it true what you told me?"

"Of course not," I interposed. "You were as free to marry in England as Mrs. Considine."

She paid no attention to me.

"Wasn't it true?" she repeated.

Fendihook laughed in vulgar bluster. "You didn't take all that rot seriously, you silly cuckoo?"

Liosha drew a step away from him and regarded him wonderingly. For the first time doubt as to his straight-dealing rose in her candid mind.

"She did," said Jaffery. "She also took seriously your promise to marry her in France."

"Well, ain't I going to marry her?"

"No," said Jaffery. "You can't."

"Who says I can't?"

"I do. You've got a wife already and three children."

"I've divorced her."

"You haven't. You've deserted her, which isn't the same thing. I've found out all about you. You shouldn't be such a famous character."

Liosha stood speechless, for a moment, quivering all over, her eyes burning.

"He's married already—" she gasped.

"Certainly. He decoyed you here just to seduce you."

Liosha made a sudden spring, like a tigress, and had it not been for Jaffery's intervening boom of an arm, her hands would have been round Fendihook's throat.

"Steady on," growled Jaffery, controlling her with his iron strength. Fendihook, who had started back with an oath, grew as white as a sheet. I tapped him on the arm.

"You had better hook it," said I. "And keep out of her way if you don't want a knife stuck into you. Yes," I added, meeting a scared look, "you've been playing with the wrong kind of woman. You had better stick to the sort you're accustomed to."

"Thank you for those kind words," said he. "I will."

"It would be wise also to keep out of the way of Jaffery Chayne. With my own eyes I've seen him pick up a man he didn't like and"—I made an expressive gesture—"throw him clean away."

"Right O!" said he.

He nodded, winked impudently and walked away. A thought struck me. I overtook him.

"Where are you staying in Havre?"

He looked at me suspiciously. "What do you want to know for?"

"To save you from being murdered, as you would most certainly be if we chanced upon the same hotel."

"I'm staying at the Phares—the swagger one on the beach near the Casino."

"Excellent," said I. "Go on swaggering. Good-bye."

"Good-bye, old pal," said he.

He tilted his white hat to a rakish angle and marched away.

I rejoined Jaffery and Liosha. He still held her wrists; but she stood unresisting, tense and rigid, with averted head, looking sidewise down. Her lip quivered, her bosom heaved. Jaffery had mastered her fury, but now we had to deal with her shame and humiliation.

"Let her go!" I whispered.

Jaffery freed her. She rubbed her wrists mechanically, without moving her head. I wished Barbara had been there; she would have known exactly what to do. As it was, we stood by her, somewhat helplessly.

"Monsieur," said a voice close by, and we saw our little blue-bloused porter. He explained that he had been seeking us everywhere. If we did not make haste we would lose the Paris train.

I replied that as we were not going to Paris, we were not pressed for time; but this little outside happening broke the situation.

"Better give this fellow your luggage ticket, Liosha," said Jaffery.

She looked about her bewildered and then I noticed on the ground a leather satchel which she had been carrying. I picked it up. She extracted the ticket and we all went to the custom-house.

"What's the programme now?" I asked Jaffery.

"Hotel," said he. "This poor girl will want a rest. Besides, we'll have to stay the night."

"Our friend is staying at the Hotel des Phares."

"Then we'll go to Tortoni's."

An ordinary woman would have drawn down the motor veil which she wore cockled-up on her travelling hat; but Liosha, grandly unconcerned with such vanities, showed her young shame-stricken face to all the world. I felt intensely sorry for her. She realised now from what a blatant scoundrel she had been saved; but she still bitterly resented our intervention. "I felt as if I was stripped naked walking between them"—that was her primitive account later of her state of mind.

"Barbara," said I, "sent you her very dear love."

She nodded, without looking at me.

"Barbara would have come too, if Susan had not been ill."

She gave a little start. I thought she was about to speak; but she remained silent. We entered the customs-shed, when she attended mechanically to her declarations.

On emerging free into the open air again, we found that the cheery sun had pierced the morning clouds and gave promise of a glorious day. The luggage was piled on the hotel omnibus. We took an open cab and rattled through the narrow flag-paved streets of the harbour quarter of the town. As we emerged into a more spacious thoroughfare, suddenly from a gaudy column at the corner flared the name of Ras Fendihook. I caught the heading of the affiche: "Music-Hall-Eldorado." Part of the mystery was solved. Jaffery had been right in his deduction that he had left London on a professional engagement; but we had not thought of an engagement out of England. I had a correct answer now to my question: "Why Havre of all places?" Jaffery sitting with Liosha on the back seat of the victoria saw it too and we exchanged glances. But Liosha had eyes for nothing save her hands tightly clasped in her lap. We passed another column before we entered the Place Gambetta, where already at that early hour, above its wide terrace, the striped awning of Tortoni's was flung. We alighted at the hotel and ordered our three rooms; coffee and roll to be taken up to madame; we men would eat our petit dejeuner downstairs. Liosha left us without saying a word.

Bathed, shaved, changed, refreshed by the good cafe au lait, gladdened by the sunshine and smugly satisfied with our morning's work, quite a different Hilary Freeth sat with Jaffery on the terrace from the sleepless wreck he had awakened two hours before. My urbane dismissal of Ras Fendihook lingered suave in my memory. The glow of conscious heroism warmed me, even like last night's dinner, to sympathy with my kind. After despatching, by the chasseur, a long telegram to Barbara, and sending up to Liosha's room a bunch of red roses we bought at a florist's hard by, I surrendered myself idly to the contemplation of the matutinal Sunday life of provincial France, while Jaffery smoked his pipe and uttered staccato maledictions on Mr. Ras Fendihook.

I love provincial France. It is narrow, it is bourgeois, it is regarding of its sous, it is what you will. But it lives a spacious, out-of-door, corporate life. On Sundays, it does not bury itself, like provincial England, in a cellular house. It walks abroad. It indulges in its modest pleasures. It is serious, it is intensely conscious of family, but it can take deep breaths of freedom. It is not Sundayfied into our vacuous boredom. It clings to the picturesque, in which it finds its dignified delight. The little soldier clad in blue tunic and red trousers struts along with his fiancee or maitresse on his arm; the cuirassier swaggers by in brass helmet and horsehair plume; the cavalry officer, dapper in light blue, with his pretty wife, drinks syrup at a neighbouring table in your cafe. The work-girls, even on Sunday, go about bareheaded, as though they were at home in the friendly street. The cure in shovel hat and cassock; the workmen for whom Sunday happens not to be the jour de repos hebdomadaire ordained by law, in their blue sarreau; the peasants from outlying villages—the men in queer shell-jackets with a complication of buttons, the women in dazzling white caps astonishingly gauffered; the lawyer in decent black, with his white cambric tie; the fat and greasy citizen with fat and greasy wife and prim, pig-tailed little daughter clad in an exiguous cotton frock of loud and unauthentic tartan, and showing a quarter of an inch of sock above high yellow boots; the superb pair of gendarmes with their cocked hats, wooden epaulettes and swords; the white-aproned waiters standing by cafe tables—all these types are distinct, picked out pleasurably by the eye; they give a cheery sense of variety; the stage is dressed.

So when Jaffery asked me what in the world we were going to do all day, I replied:

"Sit here."

"Don't you want to see the place?"

"The place," said I, "is parading before us."

"We might hire a car and run over to Etretat."

"There's Liosha," I objected. "We can't leave her alone and she's not in a mood for jaunts."

"She won't leave her room to-day, poor girl. It must be awful for her. Oh, that swine of a blighter!"

His wrath exploded again over the iniquitous Fendihook. For the dozenth time we went over the story.

"What on earth are we going to do with her?" he asked. "She can't go back to the boarding-house."

"For the time being, at any rate, I'll take her down to Barbara."

"Barbara's a wonder," said he fervently. "And do you know, Hilary, there's the makings of a devilish fine woman in Liosha, if one only knew the right way to take her."

The right way, I think, was known to me, but I did not reveal it. I assented to Jaffery's proposition.

"She has a vile temper and the mind and facile passions of a Spanish gipsy, but she has stunning qualities. She's the soul of truth and honour and as straight as a die. And brave. This has been a nasty knock for her; but I don't mind betting you that as soon as she has pulled herself together she'll treat the thing quite in a big way."

And as if to prove his assertion, who should come sailing towards us past the long line of empty tables but Liosha herself. Another woman would have lain weeping on her bed and one of us would have had to soothe her and sympathise with her, and coax her to eat and cajole her into revisiting the light of day. Not so Liosha. She arrayed herself in fresh, fawn-coloured coat and skirt, fitting close to her splendid figure, which she held erect, a smart hat with a feather, and new white gloves, and came to us the incarnation of summer, clear-eyed as the morning, our roses pinned in her corsage. Of course she was pale and her lips were not quite under control, but she made a valiant show.

We arose as she approached, but she motioned us back to our chairs.

"Don't get up. I guess I'll join you."

We drew up a chair and she seated herself between us. Then she looked steadily and unsmilingly from one to the other.

"I want to thank you two. I've been a damn fool."

"Well, old girl," said Jaffery kindly, "I must own you've been rather indiscreet."

"I've been a damn fool," she repeated.

"Anyhow it's over now. Thank goodness," said I. "Did you eat your breakfast?"

She made a little wry face. No, she could not touch it. What would she have now? I sent a waiter for cafe-au-lait and a brioche and lectured her on the folly of going without proper sustenance. The ghost of a smile crept into her eyes, in recognition, I suppose, of the hedonism with which I am wrongly credited by my friends. Then she thanked us for the roses. They were big, like her, she said. The waiter set out the little tray and the verseur poured out the coffee and milk. We watched her eat and drink. Having finished she said she felt better.

"You've got some sense, Hilary," she admitted.

"Tell me," said Jaffery. "How did we come to miss you on the boat? We watched the London trains carefully."

"I came from Southsea about an hour before the boat started and went to bed at once."

"Southsea? Why, we were there all the evening," said I. "What were you doing at Southsea?"

"Staying with Emma—Mrs. Jupp. The General lives there. I couldn't stick that boarding-house by myself any longer so I wrote to Emma to ask her to put me up."

"So that's why you went on Thursday?"

"That's why."

"Pardon me if I'm inquisitive," said I, "but did you take Mrs. Considine—I mean Mrs. Jupp—into your confidence?"

"Lord no! She's not my dragon any longer. She knew I was going to Havre—to meet friends. Of course I had to tell her that. But Jaff Chayne was the only person that had to know the truth."

We questioned her as delicately as we could and gradually the intrigue that had puzzled us became clear. Ras Fendihook left London on Sunday for a fortnight's engagement at the Eldorado of Havre. As there was no Sunday night boat for Southampton he had to travel to Havre via Paris. Being a crafty villain, he would not run away with Liosha straight from London. She was to join him a week later, after he had had time to spy out the land and make his nefarious schemes for a mock marriage. His fortnight up, he was sailing away again to America. Liosha was to accompany him. In all probability, for I delight in thinking the worst of Mr. Ras Fendihook, he would have found occasion, towards the end of his tour, of sending her on a fool's errand, say, to Texas, while he worked his way to New York, where he would have an unembarrassed voyage back to England, leaving Liosha floundering helplessly in the railway network of the United States. I have made it my business to enquire into the ways of this entertaining but unholy villain. This is what I am sure he would have done. One girl some half dozen years before he had left penniless in San Francisco and the door over which burns the Red Lamp swallowed her up forever.

For the present, however, Liosha was to join him in Havre. Not a soul must know. He gave sordid instructions as to secrecy. As Jaffery had guessed, he had instigated the comic destination of Westminster Abbey. Although her open nature abhorred the deception, she obeyed his instructions in minor details and thought she was acting in the spirit of the intrigue when she enclosed the letters to Mrs. Jardine to be posted in London. By risking discovery of her secret during her visit to the admirable lady at Southsea and by ingenuously disclosing the plot to Jaffery she showed herself to be a very sorry conspirator.

She spoke so quietly and bravely that we had not the heart to touch upon the sentimental side of her adventure. As we could not stay in Havre all day at the risk of meeting Mr. Ras Fendihook, who might swagger into the town from his swagger hotel on the plage, we carried out Jaffery's proposal, hired an automobile and drove to Etretat. We came straight from inland into the tiny place, so coquettish in its mingling of fisher-folk and fashion, so cut off from the coast world by the jagged needle gates jutting out on each side of the small bay and by the sudden grass-grown bluff rising above them, so cleanly sparkling in the sunshine, and for the first time Liosha's face brightened. She drew a deep breath.

"Oh, let us all come and live here."

We laughed and wandered among the tarred, up-turned boats wherein the fishermen store their tackle and along the pebbly beach where a few belated bathers bobbed about in the water and up the curious steps to the terrace and listened to the last number of the orchestra. Then lunch at the clean, old-fashioned Hotel Blanquet among the fishing boats; and afterwards coffee and liqueurs in the little shady courtyard. Jaffery was very gentle with Liosha, treating her tenderly like a bruised thing, and talked of his adventures and cracked little jokes and attended solicitously to her wants. Several times I saw her raise her eyes in shy gratitude, and now and then she laughed. Her healthy youth also enabled her to make an excellent meal, and after it she smoked cigarettes and sipped creme de menthe with frank gusto. To me she appeared like a naughty child who instead of meeting with expected punishment finds itself coddled in affectionate arms. All resentment had died away. Unreservedly she had laid herself as a "damn fool" at our feet—or rather at Jaffery's feet, for I did not count for much. Instead of blundering over her and tugging her up and otherwise exacerbating her wounds, he lifted her with tactful kindness to her self-respect. For the first time, save when Susan was the connecting-link, he entered into a spiritual relation with Liosha. She fulfilled his prophecy—she was dealing with a soul-shrivelling situation in a big way. He admired her immensely, as his great robust nature admired immense things. At the same time he realised all in her that was sore and grievously throbbing and needed the delicate touch. I shall never forget those few hours.

To dream away a summer's afternoon had no place, however, in Jaffery's category of delights. He must be up and doing. I have threatened on many restless occasions to rig up at Northlands a gigantic wheel for his benefit similar to that in which Susan's white mice take futile exercise. If there was such a wheel he must, I am sure, get in and whirl it round; just as if there is a boat he must row it, or tree to be felled he must fell it, or a hill to be climbed he must climb it. At Etretat, as it happens, there are two hills. He stretched forth his hand to one, of course the highest, crowned by the fishermen's chapel and ordained an ascent. Liosha was in the chastened mood in which she would have dived with him to the depths of the English Channel. I, with grudging meekness and a prayer for another five minutes devoted to the deglutition of another liqueur brandy, acquiesced.

It was not such an arduous climb after all. A light breeze tempered the fury of the July sun. The grass was crisp and agreeable to the feet. The smell of wild thyme mingling with the salt of the low-tide seaweed conveyed stimulating fragrance. When we reached the top and Jaffery suggested that we should lie down, I protested. Why not walk along the edge of the inspiring cliffs?

"It's all very well for you, who've slept like a log all night," said he throwing his huge bulk on the ground, "but Liosha and I need rest."

Liosha stood glowing on the hilltop and panting a little after the quick ascent. A little curly strand on her forehead played charmingly in the wind which blew her skirts close around her in fine modelling. I thought of the Winged Victory.

"I'm not a bit tired," she said.

But seeing Jaffery definitely prone with his bearded chin on his fists, she glanced at me as though she should say: "Who are we to go contrary to his desires?" and settled down beside him.

So I stretched myself, too, on the grass and we watched the dancing sea and the flashing sails of fishing boats and the long plume from a steamer in the offing and the little town beneath us and the tiny golfers on the cliff on the other side of the bay, and were in fact giving ourselves up to an idyllic afternoon, when suddenly Liosha broke the spell.

"If I had got hold of that man this morning I think I would have killed him."

Since leaving Havre we had not referred to unhappy things.

"It would have served him right," said Jaffery.

"I did strike him once."

"Oh?" said I.

"Yes." She looked out to sea. There was a pause. I longed to hear the details of the scene, which could not have lacked humorous elements. But she left them to my imagination. "After that," she continued, "he saw I was an honest woman and talked about marriage."

Jaffery's fingers fiddled with bits of grass. "What licks me, my dear," said he, "is how you came to take up with the fellow."

She shrugged her shoulders—it was the full shrug of the un-English child of nature. "I don't know," she said, with her gaze still far away. "He was so funny."

"But he was such a bounder, old lady," said Jaffery, in gentle remonstrance.

"You all said so. But I thought you didn't like him because he was different and could make me laugh. I guess I hated you all very much. You seemed to want me to behave like Euphemia, and I couldn't behave like Euphemia. I tried very hard when you used to take me out to dinner."

Jaffery looked at her comically. But all he said was: "Go on."

"What can I say?"—she shrugged her shoulders again. "With him I hadn't to be on my best behaviour. I could say anything I liked. You all think it dreadful because I know, like everybody else, how children come into the world, and can make jokes about things like that. Emma used to say it was not ladylike—but he—he did not say so. He laughed. His friends used to laugh. With him and his friends, I could, so to speak, take off my stays"—she threw out her hands largely—"ouf!"

"I see," said Jaffery, frowning at his blades of grass.

"But between liking, figuratively, to take off your corsets in a crowd of Bohemians and wanting to marry the worst of them lies a big difference. You must have got fond of the fellow," he added, in a low voice.

I said nothing. It was their affair. I was responsible to Barbara for her safe deliverance and here she was delivered. My attitude, as you can understand, was solely one of kindly curiosity. Liosha, for some moments, also said nothing. Rather feverishly she pulled off her new white gloves and cast them away; and I noticed an all but imperceptible something—something, for want of a better word, like a ripple—sweep through her, faintly shaking her bosom, infinitesimally ruffling her neck and dying away in a flush on her cheek.

"You loved the fellow," said Jaffery, still picking at the grass-blades.

She bent forward, as she sat; hovered over him for a second or two and clutched his shoulder.

"I didn't," she cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I thought you understood. I would have married anybody who would have taken me out of prison. He was going to take me out of prison to places where I could breathe." She fell back onto her heels and beat her breast with both hands. "I was dying for want of air. I was suffocating."

Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.

"What are you talking about?"

She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my knees.

"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my throat"—and forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's discipline she mimed her words startlingly—"I was sick—sick—sick to death. You forget, Jaff Chayne, the mountains of Albania."

"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"

She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not now. Not after—No. But mountains, freedom—anything unlike prison. Oh, I've gone mad sometimes. I've wanted to take up a fender and smash things."

"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.

"And what have you done?"

"I've broken out of prison and run away."

"That's what I did," said Liosha.

Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.

"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what it comes to."

No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy good-humour had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not given him the tiniest little scrap of her heart.

"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.

"I tried to be good to please you—you and Barbara and Hilary, who've been so kind to me."

"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I'm as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear beads."

"So do I," said Liosha.

I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees, consorted with sardonic merriment. I was checked, however, a moment afterwards, by the sight of my barbarians in the perfect agreement of babyhood calmly walking away from me along the cliff road. I jumped to my feet and pursued them.

"At any rate while you're with me," I panted, "you'll observe the decencies of civilised life."



CHAPTER XIX

"Arretez! 'Arretez!" roared Jaffery all of a sudden.

We had just passed the Havre Casino on our way back from Etretat. The chauffeur pulled up. Jaffery flung open the door, leaped out and disappeared. In a few seconds we heard his voice reverberating from side to side of the Boulevard Maritime.

"Hullo! hullo! hullo!"

I raised myself and, looking over the back of the car, saw Jaffery in characteristic attitude, shaking a strange man by the shoulders and laughing in delighted welcome. He was a squat, broad, powerful-looking fellow, with a heavy black beard trimmed to a point, and wearing a curiously ill-fitting suit of tweeds and a bowler-hat. I noticed that he carried neither stick nor gloves. The ecstasies of encounter having subsided, Jaffery dragged him to the car.

"This is my good old friend, Captain Maturin," he shouted, opening the door. "Mrs. Prescott. Mr. Freeth. Get in. We'll have a drink at Tortoni's."

Captain Maturin, unconfused by Jaffery's unceremonious whirling, took off his hat very politely and entered the car in a grave, self-possessed manner. He had clear, unblinking, grey-green eyes, the colour of a stormy sea before the dawn. I was for surrendering him my seat next Liosha, but with a courteous "Pray don't," he quickly established himself on the small seat facing us, hitherto occupied by Jaffery. Jaffery jumped up in front next the chauffeur and leaned over the partition. The car started.

"Captain and I are old shipmates." All Havre must have heard him. "From Christiania to Odessa, with all the Baltic and Mediterranean ports thrown in. In the depth of winter. Remember?"

"It was five years ago," said Captain Maturin, twisting his head round. "We sailed from the port of Leith on the 27th of December."

"And by gosh! Didn't it blow? Gales the whole time, there and back."

"It was as dirty a voyage as ever I made," said Captain Maturin.

"A ripping time, anyhow," said Jaffery.

"Weren't you very seasick?" I asked.

"Ho! ho! ho!" Jaffery roared derisively.

"Mr. Chayne's pretty tough, sir," said the Captain with a grave smile. "He has missed his vocation. He's a good sailor lost."

"Remember that night off Vigo?"

"I don't ever want to see such another, Mr. Chayne. It was touch and go." Captain Maturin's smile faded. No commander likes to think of the time when a freakish Providence and not his helpless self was responsible for the saving of his ship.

"He was on the bridge sixty hours at a stretch," said Jaffery.

"Sixty hours?" I exclaimed.

"Thousands have done it before and thousands have done it since, myself included. On this occasion Mr. Chayne saw it through with me."

Two days and nights and a day without sleep; standing on a few planks, holding on to a rail, while you are tossed up and down and from side to side and drenched with dashing tons of ice-cold water and fronting a hurricane that blows ice-tipped arrows, and all the time not knowing from one minute to the next whether you are going to Kingdom come—No. It is my idea of duty, but not my idea of fun. And even as duty—I thanked merciful Heaven that never since the age of nine, when I was violently sick crossing to the Isle of Wight, have I had the remotest desire to be a mariner, either professional or amateur. I looked at the two adventurers wonderingly; and so did Liosha.

"I love the sea," she said. "Don't you?"

"I can't say I do, ma'am. I've got a wife and child at Pinner, and I grow sweet peas for exhibition. All of which I can't attend to on board ship."

He said it very seriously. He was not the man to talk flippantly for the entertainment of a pretty woman.

"But if he's a month ashore, he fumes to get back," boomed Jaffery.

"It's the work I was bred to," replied the Captain soberly. "If a man doesn't love his work, he's not worth his salt. But that's not saying that I love the sea."

With such discourse did we beguile the short journey to the Hotel, Restaurant and Cafe Tortoni in the Place Gambetta. The terrace was thronged with the good Havre folks, husbands and wives and families enjoying the Sunday afternoon aperitif.

"Now let us have a drink," cried Jaffery, huge pioneer through the crowd. Liosha would have left us three men to our masculine devices. But Jaffery swept her along. Why shouldn't we have a pretty woman at our table as well as other people? She flushed at the compliment, the first, I think, he had ever paid her. A waiter conjured a vacant table and chairs from nowhere, in the midst of the sedentary throng. For Liosha was brought grenadine syrup and soda, for me absinthe, at which Captain Maturin, with the steady English sailor's suspicion of any other drink than Scotch whisky, glanced disapprovingly. Jaffery, to give himself an appetite for dinner, ordered half a litre of Munich beer.

"And now, Captain," said he genially, "what have you been doing with yourself? Still on the Baltic-Mediterranean?"

"No, Mr. Chayne. I left that some time ago. I'm on the Blue Cross Line—Ellershaw & Co.—trading between Havre and Mozambique."

"Where's Mozambique?" Liosha asked me.

I looked wise, but Captain Maturin supplied the information. "Portuguese East Africa, ma'am. We also run every other trip to Madagascar."

"That's a place I've never been to," said Jaffery.

"Interesting," said the Captain. He poured the little bottle of soda into his whisky, held up his glass, bowed to the lady, and to me, exchanged a solemnly confidential wink with Jaffery, and sipped his drink. Under Jaffery's questioning he informed us—for he was not a spontaneously communicative man—that he now had a very good command: steamship Vesta, one thousand five hundred tons, somewhat old, but sea-worthy, warranted to take more cargo than any vessel of her size he had ever set eyes on.

"And when do you sail?" asked Jaffery.

"To-morrow at daybreak. They're finishing loading her up now."

Jaffery drained his tall glass mug of beer and ordered another.

"Are you going to Madagascar this trip?"

"Yes, worse luck."

"Why worse luck?" I asked.

"It cuts short my time at Pinner," replied Captain Maturin.

Here was a man, I reflected, with the mystery and romance of Madagascar before him, who sighed for his little suburban villa and plot of garden at Pinner. Some people are never satisfied.

"I've not been to Madagascar," said Jaffery again.

Captain Maturin smiled gravely. "Why not come along with me. Mr. Chayne?"

Jaffery's eyes danced and his smile broadened so that his white teeth showed beneath his moustache. "Why not?" he cried. And bringing down his hand with a clamp on Liosha's shoulder—"Why not? You and I. Out of this rotten civilisation?"

Liosha drew a deep breath and looked at him in awed amazement. So did I. I thought he was going mad.

"Would you like it?" he asked.

"Like it!" She had no words to express the glory that sprang into her face.

Captain Maturin leaned forward.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Chayne, we've no license for passengers, and certainly there's no accommodation for ladies."

Jaffery threw up a hand. "But she's not a lady—in your silly old sailor sense of the term. She's a hefty savage like me. When you had me aboard, did you think of having accommodation for a gentleman? Ho! ho! ho! At any rate," said he, at the end of the peal, "you've a sort of spare cabin? There's always one."

"A kind of dog-hole—for you, Mr. Chayne."

Jaffery's keen eye caught the Captain's and read things. He jumped to his feet, upsetting his chair and causing disaster at two adjoining and crowded tables, for which, dismayed and bareheaded—Jaffery could be a very courtly gentleman when he chose—he apologized in fluent French, and, turning, caught Captain Maturin beneath the arm.

"Let us have a private palaver about this."

They threaded their way through the tables to the spaciousness of the Place Gambetta. Liosha followed them with her glance till they disappeared; then she looked at me and asked breathlessly:

"Hilary! Do you think he means it?"

"He's demented enough to mean anything," said I.

"But, seriously." She caught my wrist, and only then did I notice that her hands were bare, her gloves reposing where she had cast them on the hillside at Etretat. "Did he mean it? I'd give my immortal soul to go."

I looked into her eyes, and if I did not see stick, stark, staring craziness in them I don't know what stick, stark, staring craziness is.

"Do you know what you're letting yourself in for?" said I, pretending to believe in her sanity. "Here's a rotten old tub of a tramp—without another woman on board, with all the inherited smells of all the animals in Noah's Ark, including the descendants of all the cockroaches that Noah forgot to land, with a crew of Dagoes and Dutchmen, with awful food, without a bath, with a beast of an unventilated rabbit-hutch to sleep in—a wallowing, rolling, tossing, pitching, antiquated parody of a steamer, a little trumpery cockleshell always wet, always shipping seas, always slithery, never a dry place to sit down upon, with people always standing, sixty hours at a time, without sleep, on the bridge to see that she doesn't burst asunder and go down—a floating—when she does float—a floating inferno of misery—here it is—I can tell you all about it—any child in a board school could tell you—an inferno of misery in which you would be always hungry, always sleepless, always suffering from indigestion, always wet through, always violently ill and always dirty, with your hair in ropes and your face bloused by the wind—to say nothing of icebergs and fogs and the cargo of cotton goods catching fire, and the wheezing mediaeval boilers bursting and sending you all to glory—"

I paused for lack of breath. Liosha, who, elbows on table and chin on hands, had listened to me, first with amusement, then with absorbed interest, and lastly with glowing rapture, cried in a shaky voice:

"I should love it! I should love it!"

"But it's lunatic," said I.

"So much the better."

"But the proprieties."

She shifted her position, threw herself back in her chair, and flung out her hands towards me.

"You ought to be keeping Mrs. Jardine's boarding-house. What have Jaff Chayne and I to do with proprieties? Didn't he and I travel from Scutari to London?"

"Yes," said I. "But aren't things just a little bit different now?"

It was a searching question. Her swift change of expression from glow to defensive sombreness admitted its significance.

"Nothing is different," she said curtly. "Things are exactly the same." She bent forward and looked at me straight from beneath lowering brows. "If you think just because he and I are good friends now there's any difference, you're making a great mistake. And just you tell Barbara that."

"I will do so—" said I.

"And you can also tell her," she continued, "that Liosha Prescott is not going to let herself be made a fool of by a man who's crazy mad over another woman. No, sirree! Not this child. Not me. And as for the proprieties"—she snapped her fingers—"they be—they be anything'd!"

To this frank exposition of her feelings I could say nothing. I drank the remainder of my absinthe and lit a cigarette. I fell back on the manifest lunacy of the Madagascar voyage. I urged, somewhat anti-climatically after my impassioned harangue, its discomfort.

"You'll be the fifth wheel to a coach. Your petticoats, my dear, will always be in the way."

"I needn't wear petticoats," said Liosha.

We argued until a red, grinning Jaffery, beaming like the fiery sun now about to set, appeared winding his way through the tables, followed by the black-bearded, grey-eyed sea captain.

"It's all fixed up," said he, taking his seat. "The Cap'en understands the whole position. If you want to come to 'Jerusalem and Madagascar and North and South Amerikee,' come."

"But this is midsummer madness," said I.

"Suppose it is, what matter?" He waved a great hand and fortuitously caught a waiter by the arm. "Meme chose pour tout le monde." He flicked him away. "Now, this is business. Will you come and rough it? The Vesta isn't a Cunard Liner. Not even a passenger boat. No luxuries. I hope you understand."

"Hilary has been telling me just what I'm to expect," said Liosha.

"We'll do our best for you, ma'am," said Captain Maturin; "but you mustn't expect too much. I suppose you know you'll have to sign on as one of the crew?"

"And if you disobey orders," said I, "the Captain can tie you up to the binnacle, and give you forty lashes and put you in irons."

"I guess I'll be obedient, Captain," said Liosha, proud of her incredulity.

"I don't allow my ship's company to bring many trunks and portmanteaux aboard," smiled Captain Maturin.

"I'll see to the dunnage," said Jaffery.

"The what?" I asked.

"It's only passengers that have luggage. Sailor folk like Liosha and me have dunnage."

"I see," said I. "And you bring it on board in a bundle together with a parrot in a cage."

Earnest persuasion being of no avail, I must have recourse to light mockery. But it met with little response. "And what," I asked, "is to become of the forty-odd colis that we passed through the customs this morning?"

"You can take 'em home with you," said Jaffery. He grinned over his third foaming beaker of dark beer. "Isn't it a blessing I brought him along? I told him he'd come in useful."

"But, good Lord!" I protested, aghast, "what excuse can I, a lone man, give to the Southampton customs for the possession of all this baggage? They'll think I've murdered my wife on the voyage and I shall be arrested. No. There is the parcel post. There are agencies of expedition. We can forward the luggage by grande vitesse or petite vitesse—how long are you likely to be away on this Theophile Gautier voyage—'Cueillir la fleur de neige. Ou la fleur d'Angsoka'?"

"Four months," said Captain Maturin.

"Then if I send them by the Great Swiftness, they'll arrive just in time."

I love my friends and perform altruistic feats of astonishing difficulty; but I draw the line at being personally involved in a nightmare of curved-top trunks and green canvas hat-containing crates belonging to a woman who is not my wife.

There followed a conversation on what seemed to me fantastic, but to the others practical details, in which I had no share. A suit of oilskins and sea-boots for Liosha formed the subject of much complicated argument, at the end of which Captain Maturin undertook to procure them from marine stores this peaceful Sunday night. Liosha, aglow with excitement and looking exceedingly beautiful, also mentioned her need of thick jersey and woollen cap and stout boots not quite so tempest-defying as the others; and these, too, the foolish and apparently infatuated mariner promised to provide. We drifted mechanically, still talking, into the interior of the Cafe-Restaurant, where we sat down to a dinner which I ordered to please myself, for not one of the others took the slightest interest in it. Jaffery, like a schoolboy son of Gargamelle, shovelled food into his mouth—it might have been tripe, or bullock's heart or chitterlings for all he knew or cared. His jolly laugh served as a bass for the more treble buzz and clatter of the pleasant place. I have never seen a man exude such plentiful happiness. Liosha ate unthinkingly, her elbows on the table, after the manner of Albania, her hat not straight—I whispered the information as (through force of training) I should have whispered it to Barbara, with no other result than an impatient push which rendered it more piquantly crooked than ever. Captain Maturin went through the performance with the grave face of another classical devotee to duty; but his heart—poor fellow!—was not in his food. It was partly in Pinner, partly in his antediluvian tramp, and partly in the prospect of having as cook's mate during his voyage the superbly vital young woman of the stone-age, now accidentally tricked out in twentieth century finery, who was sitting next to him.

Captain Maturin took an early leave. He had various things to do before turning in—including, I suppose, the purchase of his cook's mate's outfit—and he was to sail at five-thirty in the morning. If his new deck-hand and cook's mate would come alongside at five or thereabouts, he would see to their adequate reception.

"You wouldn't like to ship along with me, too, Mr. Freeth?" said he, with a grip like—like any horrible thing that is hard and iron and clamping in a steamer's machinery—and athwart his green-grey eyes filled with wind and sea passed a gleam of humour—"There's still time."

"I would come with pleasure," said I, "were it not for the fact that all my spare moments are devoted to the translation of a Persian poet."

If I am not urbane, I am nothing.

He went. Liosha bade me good-bye. She must retire early. The rearrangement of her luggage—"dunnage," I corrected—would be a lengthy process. She thanked me, in her best Considine manner, for all the trouble I had taken on her account, sent her love to Barbara and to Susan, whose sickness, she trusted, would be transitory, expressed the hope that the care of her belongings would not be too great a strain upon my household—and then, like a flash of lightning, in the very middle of the humming restaurant filled with all the notabilities and respectabilities of Havre, she flung her generous arms around my neck in a great hug, and kissed me, and said: "Dear old Hilary, I do love you!" and marched away magnificently through the staring tables to the inner recesses of the hotel.

Puzzledom reigned in Havre that night. English people are credited in France with any form of eccentricity, so long as it conforms with traditions of le flegme britannique; but there was not much flegme about Liosha's embrace, and so the good Havrais were mystified.

There was no following Liosha. She had made her exit. To have run after her were an artistic crime; and in real life we are more instinctively artistic and dramatic than the unthinking might suppose. Besides, there was the bill to pay. We sat down again.

"That little chap never seems to have any luck," said Jaffery. "He's one of the finest seamen afloat, with a nerve of steel and a damnable way of getting himself obeyed. He ought to be in command of a great liner instead of a rotten old tramp of fifteen hundred tons."

I beamed. "I'm glad you call it a rotten old tramp. I described it in those terms to Liosha."

"Oh!" said Jaffery. "Precious lot you know about it." He yawned cavernously. "I'll be turning in soon, myself."

It was not yet ten o'clock. "And what shall I do?" I asked.

"Better turn in, too, if you want to see us off."

"My dear Jaff," said I, "you have always bewildered me, and when I contemplate this new caprice I am beyond the phenomenon of bewilderment. But in one respect my mind retains its serene equipoise. Nothing short of an Act of God shall drag me from my bed at half-past four in the morning."

"I wanted to give you a few last instructions."

"Give them to me now," said I.

He handed me the key of his chambers. "If you wouldn't mind tidying up, some day—I left my papers in a deuce of a mess."

"All right," said I.

"And I had better give you a power of attorney, in case anything should crop up."

He called for writing materials, and scribbled and signed the document, which I put into my letter case.

"And what about letters?"

"Don't want any. Unless"—said he, after a little pause, frowning in the plenitude of his content—"if you and Barbara can make things right again with Doria—then one of you might drop me a line. I'll send you a schedule of dates."

"Still harping on my daughter?" said I.

"You may think it devilish funny," he replied; "but for me there's only one woman in the world."

"Let us have a final drink," said I.

We drank, chatted a while, and went to bed.

When I awoke the next morning the Vesta was already four hours on her way to Madagascar.



CHAPTER XX

I have one failing. Even I, Hilary Freeth, of Northlands in the County of Berkshire, Esquire, Gent, have one failing, and I freely confess it. I cannot keep a key. Were I as other men are—which, thank Heaven, I am not—I might wear a pound or so of hideous ironmongery chained to my person. This I decline to do, with the result that, as I say, I cannot keep a key. Of all the household stowaway places under my control (and Barbara limits their number) only one is locked; and that drawer containing I know not what treasures or rubbish is likely to continue so forever and ever—for the key is lost. Such important documents as I desire to place in security I send to bankers or solicitors, who are trained from childhood in the expert use of safes and strong-boxes. My other papers the world can read if it choose to waste its time; at any rate, I am not going to lock them up and have the worry of a key preying on my mind. I should only lose it as I lost the other one. Now, by a freak of fortune, the key of Jaffery's flat remained in the suit-case wherein I had flung it at Havre, until it was fished out by Franklin on my arrival at Northlands.

"For goodness' sake, my dear," said I to Barbara, "take charge of this thing."

But she refused. She had too many already to look after. I must accept the responsibility as a moral discipline. So I tied a luggage label to the elusive object, inscribed thereon the legend, "Key of Jaffery's flat," and hung it on a nail which I drove into the wall of my library.

"Besides," said Barbara, satirically watching the operation, "I am not going to have anything to do with this crack-brained adventure."

"To hear you speak," said I, for she had already spoken at considerable length on the subject, "one would think that I could have prevented it. If Jaffery chooses to go Baresark and Liosha to throw her cap over the topmasts, why in the world shouldn't they?"

"I suppose I'm conventional," said Barbara. "And from the description you have given me of the boat, I'm sure the poor child will be utterly miserable, and she'll ruin her hands and her figure and her skin."

I wished I had drawn a little less lurid picture of the steamship Vesta.

As soon as business or idleness took me to town, I visited St. Quentin's Mansions, and after consultation with the porter, who, knowing me to be a friend of Mr. Chayne's, assured me that I need not have burdened myself with the horrible key, I entered Jaffery's chambers. I found the small sitting-room in very much the same state of litter as when Jaffery left it. He enjoyed litter and hated the devastating tidiness of housemaids. Give a young horse with a long, swishy tail a quarter of an hour's run in an ordinary bachelor's rooms, and you will have the normal appearance of Jaffery's home. As I knew he did not want me to dust his books and pictures (such as they were) or to make order out of a chaos, of old newspapers, or to put his pipes in the rack or to remove spurs and physical culture apparatus from the sofa, or to bestow tender care upon a cannon ball, an antiquated eighteen or twenty-pounder, which reposed—most useful piece of furniture—in the middle of the hearth-rug, or to see to the comfortless electric radiator that took the place of a grate, I let these things be, and concentrated my attention on his papers which lay loose on desk and table. This was obviously the tidying up to which he had referred. I swept his correspondence into one drawer. I gathered together the manuscript of his new novel and swept it into another. On the top of a pedestal bookcase I discovered the original manuscript of "The Greater Glory," neatly bound in brown paper and threaded through with red tape. This I dropped into the third drawer of the desk, which already contained a mass of papers. I went into his bedroom, where I found more letters lying about. I collected them and looked around. There seemed to be little left for me to do. I noticed two photographs on his dressing-table—one of his mother, whom I remembered, and, one of Doria—these I laid face downwards so that the light should not fade them. I noticed also a battered portmanteau from beneath the lid of which protruded three or four corners of scribbling paper, and lastly my eyes fell upon the offending beer-barrel in a dark alcove. The basin set below the tap, in order to catch the drip, was nearly full. In four months' time the room would be flooded with sour and horrible beer. Full of the thought, I deposited the letters in the drawer with the rest of the correspondence, and, leaving the flat, summoned the lift, and in Jaffery's name presented a delighted porter with the contents of a nine-gallon cask. I went away in the rich glow that mantles from man's heart to check when he knows that he has made a friend for life. It was only afterwards, when I got home, and hung the labelled key on my library wall, that I realised that old Jaffery and myself had, at least, one thing in common—videlicet, the keyless habit. I had often suspected that deep in our souls lurked some hidden trait-d'union. Now I had found it.