“There!” she cried, “what do you think of that?”

“What do I think of what?” I asked, regarding the acre of print.

“Adrian Boldero has written a novel!”

“Adrian?” said I.  “Well, my dear, what of it?  Poor old Adrian is capable of anything.  Nothing he did would ever surprise me.  He might write a sonnet to a Royal Princess’s first set of false teeth or steal the tin cup from a blind beggar’s dog, and he would be still the same beautiful, charming, futile Adrian.”

Barbara pished and insisted.  “But this is apparently a wonderful novel.  There’s a whole column about it.  They say it’s the most astounding book published in our generation.  Look!  A work of genius.”

“Rubbish, darling,” said I, knowing my Adrian.

“Take the trouble to read the notice,” said Barbara, thrusting the paper at me in a superior manner.

I took it from her and read.  She was right.  Somebody calling himself Adrian Boldero had written a novel called “The Diamond Gate,” which a usually sane and distinguished critic proclaimed to be a work of genius.  He sketched the outline of the story, indicated its peculiar wonder.  The review impressed me.

“Barbara, my dear,” said I, “this is somebody else—­not our Adrian.”

“How many people in the world are called Adrian Boldero?”

“Thousands,” said I.

She pished again and tossed her pretty head.

“I’ll go and telephone straight away to Adrian and find out all about it.”

She departed through the library door into the recesses of the house where the telephone has its being.  I resumed consideration of my presidential address.  But Hafiz eluded me, and Adrian occupied my thoughts.  I took up the paper and read the review again; and the more I read, the more absurd did it seem to me that the author of “The Diamond Gate” and my Adrian Boldero could be one and the same person.

You see, we had, all four of us, Adrian, Jaffery Chayne, Tom Castleton and myself, been at Cambridge together, and formed after the manner of youth a somewhat incongruous brotherhood.  We knew one another’s shortcomings to a nicety and whenever three of the quartette were gathered together, the physical prowess, the morals and the intellectual capacity of the absent fourth were discussed with admirable lack of reticence.  So it came to pass that we gauged one another pretty accurately and remained devoted friends.  There were other men, of course, on the fringe of the brotherhood, and each of us had our little separate circle; we did not form a mutual admiration society and advertise ourselves as a kind of exclusive, Athos, Porthos, Aramis and d’Artagnan swashbucklery; but, in a quiet way, we recognised our quadruple union of hearts, and talked amazing rubbish and committed unspeakable acts of lunacy and dreamed impossible dreams in a very delightful, and perhaps unsuspected, intimacy.  We were now in our middle and late thirties—­all