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—­”