"And Aunt Doria?"

Again he reddened--but he turned to Doria and bowed.

"In my quality of ogre only--a _bonne bouche_," said he.

It was said very charmingly, and we laughed. Of course Susan began the
inevitable question, but Barbara hurriedly notified some dereliction
with regard to gravy, and my small daughter was, so to speak, hustled
out of the conversation. Jaffery by way of apology for his Gargantuan
appetite discoursed on the privations of travel in uncivilised lands. A
lump of sour butter for lunch and a sardine and a hazelnut for dinner.
We were to fancy the infinite accumulation of hunger-pangs. And as he
devoured cold beef and talked, Doria watched him with the somewhat aloof
interest of one who stands daintily outside the railed enclosure of a
new kind of hippopotamus.

The meal over we sought the deep shade of the terrace which faces due
east. Jaffery, in his barbaric fashion, took Doria by the elbow and
swept her far away from the wistaria arbour beneath which the remaining
three of us were gathered, and when he fondly thought he was out of
earshot, he set her beside him on the low parapet. My wife, with the
responsibilities of all the Chancelleries of Europe knitted in her brow,
discussed wedding preparations with Adrian. I, to whom the quality of
the bath towels wherewith Adrian and his wife were to dry themselves and
that of the sheets between which their housemaid was to lie, were
matters of black and awful indifference, gave my more worthily applied
attention to one of a new brand of cigars, a corona corona, that had its
merits but lacked an indefinable soul-satisfying aroma; and I was on the