“Ten years.  How did you guess?”

Doria smiled with feminine wisdom.  “She’s the gentlest maiden lady that ever was.  It’s only a man that could have thought of saddling her with our friend.  Well—­that’s impossible.  She would be the death of your sister in a week.  You can’t look after her yourself—­that wouldn’t be proper.”

“And it would be the death of me too!” said Jaffery.

“You can’t leave her in lodgings or a flat by herself, for the poor woman would die of boredom.  The only thing that remains is the boarding-house.”

Jaffery regarded her with the open-eyed adoration of a heathen Goth receiving the Gospel from Saint Ursula.

“By Jove!” he murmured.  “You’re wonderful.”

“Let us stretch our legs, Hilary,” said Adrian, who had not displayed enthusiastic interest in the housing of Liosha.

So we went off, leaving the two together, and we discoursed on the mystic ways of women, omitting all reference, as men do, to the exceptional paragon of femininity who reigned in our respective hearts.  Perhaps we did a foolish thing in thus abandoning saint and hungry convert to their sympathetic intercourse.  The saint could hold her own; she had vowed herself to Adrian, and she belonged to the type for whom vows are irrefragable; but poor old Jaffery had made no vows, save of loyalty to his friends; which vows, provided they are kept, are perfectly consistent with a man’s falling hopelessly, despairingly in love with his friend’s affianced bride.  And, as far as Barbara and myself have been able to make out, it was during this intimate talk that Jaffery fell in love with Doria.  Of course, what the French call le coup de foudre, the thunderbolt of love had smitten him when he had first beheld Doria alighting from the motor-car.  But he did not realise the stupefying effect of this bang on the heart till he had thus sat at her little feet and drunk in her godlike wisdom.

The fairy tales are very true.  The rumbustious ogre has a hitherto undescribed, but quite imaginable, gap-toothed, beetle-browed ogress of a wife.  Why he married her has never been told.  Why the mortal male whom we meet for the first time at a dinner party has married the amazing mortal female sitting somewhere on the other side of the table is an insoluble mystery, and if we can’t tell even why men mate, what can we expect to know about ogres?  At all events, as far as the humdrum of matrimony is concerned, the fairy tales are truer than real life.  The ogre marries his ogress.  It is like to like.  But when it comes to love—­and if love were proclaimed and universally recognised as humdrum, there would never be a tale, fairy or otherwise, ever told again in the world worth the hearing—­we have quite a different condition of affairs.  Did you ever hear of an ogre sighing himself to a shadow for love of a gap-toothed ogress?  No.  He goes out into the fairy world, and, sending his ogress-wife