“It was hell, Hilary, old chap, to chuck the Persian proposition,” said he, his hands in his trouser pockets, looking out of the window at the infinitely reaching landscape of the chimney pots of south London, their grey smoke making London’s unique pearly haze below the crisp blue of the March sky.  “Just hell!” he muttered in his bass whisper, and craning round my neck I could, with the tail of my eye, catch his gaze, which was very wistful and seemed directed not at the opalescent mystery of the London air, but at the clear vividness of the Persian desert.  Away and away, beyond the shimmering sand, gleamed the frosted town with white walls, white domes, white minarets against the horizon band of topaz and amethystine vapours.  And in his nostrils was the immemorable smell of the East, and in his ears the startling jingle of the harness and the pad of the camels, and the guttural cries of the drivers, and in his heart the certainty of plucking out the secret from the soul of this strange land. . . .

At last he swung round and throwing himself into the armchair enquired politely after the health of Barbara and Susan.  As far as the Persian journey was concerned the palaver was ended.  He did not intend to give me his reasons for staying in England and I could not demand them more insistently.  At any rate I had discovered the cause of his grumpiness.  What creature of Jaffery’s temperament could be contented with a soft bed in the centre of civilisation, when he had the chance of sleeping in verminous caravanserais with a saddle for pillow?  In spite of his amazing predilections, Jaffery was very human.  He would make a great sacrifice without hesitation; but the consequences of the sacrifice would cause him to go about like a bear with a sore head.

And the cause of the sacrifice?  Obviously Doria.  Once having been admitted to her bedside, he went there every day.  Flowers and fruit he had sent from the very beginning in absurd profusion; a grape for Doria failed in adequacy unless it was the size of a pumpkin.  Now he brought the offerings personally in embarrassing bulk.  One offering was a gramophone which nearly drove her mad.  Even in its present stage of development it offends the sensitive ear; but in its early days it was an instrument of torturing cacophony.  And Jaffery, thinking the brazen strains music of the spheres, would turn on the hideous engine, when he came to see her, and would grin and roar and expect her to shew evidence of ravished senses.  She did her best, poor child, out of politeness and recognition of his desire to alleviate her lot; but I don’t think the gramophone conveyed to her heart the poor dear fellow’s unspoken message.  But gently criticising the banality of the tunes the thing played and sending him forth in quest of records of recondite and “unrecorded” music, she succeeded in mitigating the terror.  To the present moment, however, I don’t think Jaffery has realised that she had a higher aesthetic equipment than the