“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.