“You want to tell me something.”

“I do.  Something that is known only to four people in the world—­and they’re in this house.”

“If you tell me, I guess it’ll be known only to five,” said Liosha.

To have questioned the loyalty of her eyes would have been to insult truth itself.

“All right,” said I.  “You’ll be the fifth and last.”  And then, as simply as I could, I told her all there was to know.  She grasped the literary details more quickly than I had anticipated.  I found afterwards that the long months of the voyage had not been entirely taken up with the cooking of bacon and the swabbing of decks; there had been long stretches of tedium beguiled by talk on most things under heaven, and aided by her swift and jealous intelligence her mental horizon had broadened prodigiously through constant association with a cultivated man. . . .  When I reached the point in my story where Jaffery gave up the Persian expedition, she gripped the arms of her chair, and her lips worked in their familiar quiver.

“He must have loved her to do that,” she said in a low voice.

I went on, and the more involved I became in the disastrous affair, the more was I convinced that it would he better for her to understand clearly the imbroglio of Jaffery and Doria.  You see, I knew all along, as all along I hope I have given you to understand—­ever since the day when she asked him to beat her with a golf-stick—­that the poor girl loved Jaffery, heart and soul.  I knew also that she made for herself no illusions as to Jaffery’s devotion to Doria.  On that point her words to me at Havre had left me in no doubt whatever.  But since Havre all sorts of extraordinary things had happened.  There had been their intimate comradeship in the savagery (from my point of view) of the last few months.  There was now Doria’s awful change of soul-attitude towards Adrian.  It was right that Liosha should be made aware of the emotional subtleties that underlay the bare facts.  It seemed cruel to tell her of the last scene, so pathetic, so tragic, so grotesque, between the man she loved and the other woman.  But her unflinching bravery and her great heart demanded it.  And as I told her, walking nervously about the room, she followed me with her steadfast eyes.

“So that’s why Jaff Chayne came abroad with me.”

“I suppose so,” said I.

“If I had been a man I should have strangled her, or flung her out of the window.”

“I dare say.  But you wouldn’t have been Jaff Chayne.”

“That’s true,” she assented.  “No man like him ever walked the earth.  And how a woman could be so puppy-blind as not to see it, I can’t imagine.”

“Her head was full of another man, you see.”

“Oh yes, I see,” she said with a touch of contempt.  “And such a man!  You were fond of him I know.  But he was a sham.  He used to look on me, I remember, as an amusing sort of animal out of the Zoological Gardens.  It never occurred to him that I had sense.  He was a fool.”