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At last Jaffery threw up his hands and, without a word, cleared the lowest shelf of the safe. Quickly we ran through the mass. We could not trust ourselves to speak. There are times when words are too idle a medium for interchange of thought. We found nothing different from the contents of the two upper shelves. The apparently coherent manuscript we placed with the rest. Again we examined it.
"And he hasn't any?" "Read the thing again." Jaffery scanned the page mechanically and looked up: "Well, what's to be done now?" "I should like to compare the proofs with Adrian's original manuscript. Where is it?" Here was the question we had all dreaded. Jaffery lied convincingly. "It went to the printers, my dear, and of course they've destroyed it." "I thought everything was typed nowadays."
To go further she maintains that the two quarrelled dreadfully over the alleviation of her labours, so much so, that often before they had ended their quarrel, she had performed the task in dispute. This of course Jaffery has blusteringly denied. She was there, paid to do certain things, and she had to do them.
Like the Ouidaesque hero, who could ride a Derby Winner with one hand, and stroke a University Crew to victory with the other, Jaffery could with one hand hang on to a rope over a yawning abyss, while with the other he could scribble a graphic account of the situation on a knee-supported writing-pad.
And though I say it as shouldn't, dear old Hilary," he clapped me on the shoulder "it's a damned fine book." I shall always remember him as he said this, in the pride of his manhood, a defiant triumph in his eyes, his head thrown back, and a smile revealing the teeth below his well-trimmed moustache. He had conquered at last. He had put poor old Jaffery and fortune-favoured me in the shade.
She had watched at the street entrance until he had taken some one up in the lift, and then she had mounted the interminable stairs. I could have caught Jaffery by letter at Genoa or Marseilles; but in view of his imminent return, I did not write to him. What useful purpose would have been served?
"Of course I would," said Jaffery eagerly. "But that's just it. You weren't equal to the worry. Now you're all right and I agree with Hilary. You ought to read it. You see, some of the bridges are so jolly clumsy." Doria turned to my wife. "Do you think I would be justified?" "Decidedly," said Barbara. "You ought to read it at once."
Susan, refusing to be parted from her beloved Liosha, carried her off to the nursery to hear more fairy-tales of the steamship Vesta. Barbara and Doria went into the drawing-room, where Jaffery and I, after a perfunctory liqueur brandy, soon joined them.
Beside her, in the first sunbonnet of the year, sat Susan, a prim monkey of nine. . . . Lord! It scarcely seemed two years since Jaffery came from Albania and tossed the seven year old up in his arms and was struck all of a heap by Doria at their first meeting. So thought I, looking from my study-table at the pretty picture some thirty yards, away.
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.
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