[Illustration:  Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek.]

“You ought to have a jolly good thrashing,” roared Jaffery.

At this Liosha, who had endured our abuse with the downcast eyes of angelic meekness, took a golfclub from a bag lying on the hall table and handed it to the red-bearded giant.

“I guess I do,” she said.  “Beat me.”

And, as I am a living man, I swear that if Jaffery had taken her at her word and laid on lustily she would have taken her thrashing without a murmur.  What was one to do with such a woman?

Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, fingered the cleek.  Gradually she raised her glorious eyes to him, and in them I was startled to see the most extraordinary doglike submission.  He frowned portentously and shook his head.  Her lips worked, and after a convulsive sob or two, she threw herself on the ground, clasped his knees, and to our dismay burst into a passion of weeping.  Barbara, rushing into the hall at this juncture, like a fairy tornado, released us from our embarrassing position.  She annihilated us with a sweeping glance of scorn.

“Oh, go away, both of you, go away!”

So we went away and left her to deal with Liosha.

Save for such little excursions and alarms the days passed very pleasantly.  Jaffery spent most of the sweltering hours of daylight (it was a blazing summer) in playing golf on the local course.  Adrian and Doria trod the path of the perfect lovers, while I, to justify my position as President of the Hafiz Society, worked hard at a Persian Grammar.  Barbara, the never idle, was in the meantime arranging for Liosha’s future.  Her organising genius had brought Doria’s suggestion as to the First Class London Boarding House into the sphere of practical things.  The Boarding House idea alone would not work; but, combine it with Mrs. Considine, and the scheme ran on wheels.

“Even you,” said Barbara, as though I were a sort of Schopenhauer, a professional disparager of her sex—­“even you have a high opinion of Mrs. Considine.”

I had.  Every one had a high opinion of Mrs. Considine.  She was not very beautiful or very clever or very fascinating or very angelic or very anything—­but she was one of those women of whom everybody has a high opinion.  The impoverished widow of an Indian soldierman, with a son soldiering somewhere in India, she managed to do a great deal on very small means.  She was a woman of the world, a woman of character.  She knew how to deal with people of queer races.  Heaven indicated her for appointment by Barbara as Liosha’s duenna in the Boarding House.  Mrs. Considine, herself compelled to live in these homes for the homeless, gladly accepted the proposal, came down, interviewed her charge, who happened then to be in a mood of meekness indescribable, and went away, so to speak, with her contract in her pocket.  It was part of the programme that Mrs. Considine should tactfully carry on Liosha’s education, which had been arrested at the age of twelve, instil into her a sense of Western decorum, extend her acquaintance, and gradually root out of her heart the yearning to do her enemies to death.  It was a capital programme; and I gave it the benediction of a smile, in which, seeing Barbara’s shrewd blue eyes fixed on me, I suppressed the irony.