And looking back on that wreck of a room, I reflected how congenial Jaffery must have found his surroundings on board the Vesta.  The weather had changed from summer calm to storm.  The gentleman from the meteorological office who writes for the newspapers talked about cyclonic disturbances, and reported gales in the channel and on the west coasts of France.  The same was likely to continue.  The wind blew hard enough in Berkshire, what must it have done in the Bay of Biscay?  As a matter of fact, as we learned from a picture postcard from Jaffery and a short letter from Liosha posted at Bordeaux, and from their lips considerably later—­for impossible as it may seem, they did not go to the bottom or die of scurvy or the cannibal’s pole-axe—­they had made their way from Havre in an ever-increasing tempest, during which they apparently had not slept or put on a dry rag.  Heavy seas washed the deck, and kept out the galley fires, so that warm food had not been procurable.  It seemed that every horror I had prophesied had come to pass.  I should have pitied them, but for the blatant joyousness of their communications.  “I was not seasick a minute, and I have never been so happy in my life,” wrote Liosha.  “Hilary should have been with us,” wrote Jaffery.  “It would have made a man of him.  Liosha in splendid fettle.  She goes about in men’s clothes and oilskins and can turn her hand to anything when she isn’t lashed to a stanchion.”  You can just imagine them having cast off all semblance of Christians and wallowing in wet and dirt. . . .

About this time, according to the sequence of events recorded in my all too scraggy diary, Doria came to us for a week-end, her first visit since Jaffery’s outrageous conduct.  She was glad to make friends with us once more, and to prove it showed the pleasanter side of her character.  She professed not to have forgiven Jaffery; but she referred to the terrible episode in less vehement terms.  It was obvious to us both that she missed him more than she would confess, even to herself.  In her reconstituted existence he had stood for an essential element.  Unconsciously she had counted on his devotion, his companionship, his constant service, his bulky protection from the winds of heaven.  Now that she had driven him away, she found a girder wanting in her life’s neat structure, which accordingly had begun to wobble uncomfortably.  After all, she had provoked the man (this with some reluctance she admitted to Barbara), and he had only picked her up and shaken her.  He had had no intention of dashing out her brains or even of giving her a beating.  In her heart she repented.  Otherwise why should she take so ill Jaffery’s flight with Liosha, which she characterised as abominable, and Liosha’s flight with Jaffery, which she characterised as monstrous?

“I can’t talk to Barbara about it,” she said to me on the Sunday morning, perching herself on the corner of my library table, a disrespectful trick which she had caught from my wife, while I sat back in my writing-chair.  “Barbara seems to be bemused about the woman.  One would think she was a kind of saint, incapable of stain.”