From her point of view, and from any outside person’s point of view, she was perfectly right.  My bland ignorance was disgraceful.  If she had brought an action against us for recovery of these wretched manuscripts and we managed to keep the essential secret, both counsel and judge would have flayed me alive. . . .  Put yourself in her place for a minute—­God knows I tried to do so hard enough—­and you will see the logic of her position, all through.  She was not a woman of broad human sympathies and generous outlook; she was intense and narrow.  Her whole being had been concentrated on Adrian during their brief married life; it was concentrated now on his memory.  To her, as to all the world, he flamed a dazzling meteor.  Her faults, which were many and hard to bear with, all sprang from the bigotry of love.  Nothing had happened to cloud her faith.  She had come up against many incomprehensible things:  the delay in publication of Adrian’s book; the change of title; the burning of Adrian’s last written words on the blotting pad; the vivid pictures that were obviously not Adrian’s; the consignment to a printer’s Limbo of the original manuscripts; my own placid disassociation from the literary side of the executorship.  She had accepted them—­not without protest; but she had in fact accepted them.  Now she struck a reef of things more incomprehensible still.  Jaffery had lied to her outrageously.  I, for one, hold her justified in her indignation.

But what on earth could I do?  What on earth could my poor Barbara do?  We sat, both of us, racking our brains for some fantastic invention, while Doria, like a diminutive tragedy queen, walked about my library, inveighing against Jaffery and crying for her manuscripts.  And I dared not know anything at all about them.  She had every reason to reproach me.

Barbara, feeling very uncomfortable, said:  “You mustn’t blame Hilary.  When Adrian died each of the executors took charge of a special department.  Jaffery Chayne did not interfere with Hilary’s management of financial affairs, and Hilary left Jaffery free with the literary side of things.  It has worked very well.  This silly muddle about the manuscripts doesn’t matter a little bit.”

“But it does matter,” cried Doria.

And it did.  Now that she knew that those sacred manuscripts written by the dear, dead hand had not been destroyed by printers, every fibre of her passionate self craved their possession.  We argued futilely, as people must, who haven’t the ghost of a case.

“But why has Jaffery lied?”

“The manuscript of ‘The Diamond Gate,’” I declared, again perjuring myself, “has nothing whatever to do with Jaffery and me.  As I’ve told you it was not among Adrian’s papers which we went through together.  We’re narrowed down to ‘The Greater Glory.’  Possibly,” said I, with a despairing flash, “Jaffery had to pull it about so much and deface it with his own great scrawl, that he thought it might pain you to see it, and so he told you that it had disappeared at the printer’s.  Now that I remember, he did say something of the kind.”