“All the same—­” I began.

“All the same,” she interrupted, “this is a very untidy conversation.  I didn’t come in here to talk, but to borrow a copy of Baudelaire, if you have one.”

She turned to scan my shelves.  I joined her and took down Les Fleurs du Mal.  She thanked me, tucked the book under her arm, and went out.

Rather uncharitably I rejoiced in her soreness.  It was good discipline.  It would give her a sense of values.  Should she ever get Jaffery back again, with no Liosha hanging round his neck, I was certain that not only would she forgive past mishandling, but for the sake of keeping him would put up with a little more.  Whether she would marry him was another story.  I had every reason to believe that she would not.  Adrian reigned her bosom’s lord.  In her worshipping fidelity she never wavered.  She regarded a second marriage with horror.  That was comprehensible enough, with her husband but seven months dead.  No, should she ever get Jaffery back, I didn’t think she would marry him; but beyond doubt she would treat him with more consideration and respect.  These, of course, were my conjectures and deductions (confirmed by Barbara) from the patent fact that she found herself lost without Jaffery and that she was furiously jealous of Liosha.

It was several weeks before we saw her again.  August arrived.  Barbara and I played the ever-fresh summer comedy.  I swore by all my gods I would not leave Northlands.  I went on vowing until I arrived with a mountain of luggage, a wife and a child and a maid at a great hotel on the Lido.  Our days were unimportant.  We bathed in the Adriatic.  We revisited familiar churches and picture galleries in Venice.  We mingled with a cosmopolitan crowd and developed the complexions (not only in our faces) of an Othello family.  Doria, too, made holiday abroad.  Every August, Mr. Jornicroft repaired the ravages of eleven months’ civic and other feasting at Marienbad, and Doria, as she had done before her marriage, accompanied him.  She and Barbara exchanged letters about nothing in particular.  The time passed smoothly.

Once or twice we had word from our runagates.  The fury of the sea having subsided after they had left Bordeaux, they had settled down to the normal life of shipboard, and Jaffery took his turn with the hands, coiled ropes, sweated over cargo, and kept his watch.  Liosha, we were given to understand, besides helping in the galley and the cabin and swabbing decks, found much delight in painting the ship’s boats with paint which Jaffery had bought for the purpose at Bordeaux.  She had struck up a friendship with the first mate, who, possessing a camera, had taken their photographs.  They sent us one of the two standing side by side, and a more villainous-looking yet widely smiling pair you could not wish to see.  Both wore sailors’ caps and jerseys and sea-boots, and Barbara’s keen eye detected the fact that Liosha, for freedom’s sake, had cut a foot or so off the bottom of her skirt without taking the trouble to hem up the edge, which, now frayed, hung about her calves in disgraceful fringes.